The Home Machinist!

If the hovercraft doesn't work, you can still weld a chair to it and ride it around the shop.

Thanks for the photo, but I'm only planning to get one lathe.

You are the man, Frank. I'm still learning about tools, so I get nervous about going against the herd. For all I know, a lathe explodes when you get it too close to the wall. Can't quite figure out how a single pigtail would allow you to move all that stuff, but I guess I can solve the puzzle when t...

So it sounds like it might be worth it to put the lathe where I want it and then suffer the pain of moving it on the rare occasions when I need to see the wires.

I am starting to think I need to break down and get a Grizzly G4003G. I would love to have the old Clausing I was considering, but the Grizzly has a gap bed, it's new, it has a warranty, etcetera. Problem: the manual says to put the back of the machine 24" from the wall. I can find a way to do ...

I contacted John Fahnestock (the guy who restored the pictured Bridgeport) a while back, but at that time, I wasn't aware that the cheap old Bridgeports I kept seeing on Ebay and so on were generally messed up. I thought it was going to be easy to find a nice $1500 machine and have it shipped for a ...

Every time I think I know what to get, I find something out that changes the whole picture. The Grizzly doesn't look too bad. It can be sitting in my garage for $3K, and if it will actually do quality work, it may be the best way to go. The resale value is awful, but I guess if I use it for a decade...

I am determined to get a mill and a lathe, but it has been hard finding good machinery at the kind of thieving prices a cheap guy like me is willing to pay. I thought I was ready to get a Clausing 5914 I found online. The price was okay, and the vendor had a great reputation. Then a friend of mine w...

Where do you put the toast in?

RE the Dr. Pepper bottle, I prefer English to metric.

I appreciate you scanning that second page, as I don't seem to have it. Maybe it got separated from the other papers. Here's something confusing, which you may be able to explain. The manual says the round capacity is 5 1/8", and it specifically refers to "round stock," which does not...

I have a Porter-Cable 1410 dry-cut saw. I just looked at the manual. The cutting capacity for a piece of solid (not tubing) round stock at 90 degrees is 5 1/8", not 1/4". The earlier post that cited 1/4" sounded odd to me, so I had to look it up. I didn't see anything in the manual ab...

The thing that got me started on the machine tool quest was the drive to get a drill press. Wanting a "forever" tool, I looked around and found that it was impossible to get a really good drill press for under $800. I realized a mill with a quill would do all the drilling stuff, plus milli...