The Home Machinist!

Some time ago there was a mailing list on the subject of building a precision lathe from scratch. A lot of ideas were kicked out, discussion ensued, and the group went off into a direction I didn't care to follow. (custom castings and ultra-precision spindles, etc.) I dropped out. I had contributed ...

> 4 pitch I don't have the old stub handy to measure; I was going by old Ross lore. But if it is 4 pitch, my lathe will do those with no trouble. Fortunately, I found someone who says he has a copy of an original Ross factory drawing showing the official thread profile, and presumably pitch. He'll m...

I have a 1905 Ross rifle I need to rebarrel. The barrel thread is bizarre; 1-1/16 by 3, with a mutant buttress profile, or an Acme with the front slanted and the back square. The manual for my 1955 Atlas 10x60 says that, with a bit of jiggery and some additional intermediate gears, that it can indee...

I found several on eBay for $55-$75.

I did a search on "rogers rockwell" and the forum search function didn't turn up anything, so hopefully this topic hasn't been worn out already. Here's a link to a site where a guy has plans and pictures of a DIY Rockwell tester: http://rayrogers.com/rhc_plans.htm Basically, it uses two le...

Offsetting the spindle to the back (or the front way toward the operator) spreads the load from the cutting tool more toward the back way, equalizing pressure and wear. I haven't personally encountered a manual lathe with a noticeable offset, but it seems to be very common on slant-bed CNC machines....

Now I'll be waiting for randyc's "crazy stuff you can do with a horizontal mill" thread!

I worked in a machine shop that had no horizontal mills. Most of my machinist books I bought referred to horizontals as "obsolete." Used ones went for a fraction of the price of verticals. Then I got a bunch of older books, and they only discussed horizontals; many of them only mentioned v...

The most common way I've seen to do it is to make an adapter to hold a lathe bit in the taper or collet in the locked quill, or sometimes an adapter bolted to the head, and to use a spindex and tailstock with a motor drive. The spindex axis becomes Z, the quill becomes Y, and the left-right X table ...

Oooohhhh niiice! The simplest thing is to find out if it's stepper or servo driven, pick the controller hardware that fits your budget - Geckos are popular - and controller software. I use Mach3. You might want to check out TurboCNC and EMC2; I haven't looked at their lathe support, but they're free.

Thanks, guys!

Looking at my old machinist books I see discussion of the differences between plain and roller bearing headstocks. They mostly talk about oiling, scraping, and re-babbitting the plain bearings. I changed the headstock bearings in my 10" bench lathe a few years ago. It uses taper roller bearings...