The Home Machinist!

Whats the tir on the lathe ? How well does it remove metal, like in cutting on a 200 mm D steel disc//billet ? Can You do 1- 1,5 mm deep cuts at 400-500 rpm ? Thats what I get with ccmt inserts, 12x24 lathe, and the chips are brown, purple-black if I go too fast on the rpm. .. I´m also hoping to be ...

The plastic will easily work if you have enough surface area.
Plastic will float a 1000 kg mass, easily, around 1 m2 of area, on drag.

Igus has calcs on this, and free engineering support.

I disagree on the no-chinese idea. About 12 years ago I bought a new 12x24" *heavy*, note heavy, chinese lathe, a chester craftsman, from chester uk. About 2500€. new. 350 kg, == 900 lbs, 450 kg with stand. The heavy-series chinese lathes from about 11x upwards are really really good. They have...

Make any suitable subtable, so you can epoxy or superglue the part onto it. Using suitable endstops, like cheap gage pins, or eccentric holders if you can afford them. The glue will hold the part, unless sometimes it wont. It´s very uncommon for glue to fail on such large flat parts. But any program...

Excellent thread ! Looking at above data, I would guesstimate around 1800$-2500$-3500$ for a system for doing castings, given a suitable free propane/heat source. Including gloves, boots, gauntlets, helmets, sand for protecting the base area, etc etc. And tubes, valve, connectors, for the propane. B...

Em .. I´ve done a lot of work on this stuff. (With new 10 kW PV panels, among other things.) 1. First, some of the old downlights consume 60W / 3, while others consume 12 W/3. 5:1 difference. Just replacing the downlights with leds DOES NOT cure the base problem. Several of the old style downlight t...

Anyway, I would buy any new or newish chinese lathe of 12x size .. as long as it is heavy. My 12x24" was 450 kg .. and some are as light as 250 kg. Heavier is vastly better. I paid about 2500€ new, 12 years ago. Excellent machine originally, now vastly rebuilt at great cost into a great small c...

Moving a small under 500 kg lathe is no problem. A 3000 kg chain hoist is under 100$ .. about 80€ on amazon where I bought mine. 2000 kg pallet jacks are not expensive. Any local crane operator who delivers building materials, will likely lift and move anything for 100$ an hour .. and won´t charge t...

Great thread !
Agree with most.

Need to move my shop and house soon --
with a lot of big and heavy pieces.

I understand the OPs angst. Soonish, I hope to be able to make nuts for him and anyone else, in these rare custom sizes. 55 or 60 degrees has an effect, as does possible pipe thread, caterpillar thread, and unlikely bbt british bicycle in this size. I expect to make custom nuts for around 8€ for one...

I hate to disagree with Harold_V as I learned so much from him. And very much appreciate it. But 15 years ago I started to make a *good* cnc lathe and started with a chicom 7x-14, more or less, here in spain. After some time I started to use ccmt 21.25 inserts and tools from chronos in the uk. All m...

My €0.03.. 1. the pp pendants are basically a waste of time. Because the signals are polled at low speed, 25 kHz, rely on catching state changes, and often have hw issues as you have seen, they have nothing to do in terms of functionality with real pendants. Ex. A PP MPG wheel, will have high and va...