The Home Machinist!

Steve, Harold, thanks for chiming in, the chuck is an old polish made chuck ( PUTm brand ) that came with my Maximat V10P so I guess you could consider it a 'weird' chuck, the jaw inserts don't look like anything thats available. Luckily the spindle thread is the same as my V7 so I've been using tha...

From the start I've always used solid jaw chucks on my lathe ( it's what came with my 1st lathe ) having acquired a second lathe a while ago which came with a two piece jaw chuck which are new to me, I look at the two pieced jaw chuck with dread, since the jaws stick out so much compared to solid ja...

I'll second what John said about measuring before cutting off the tang. Another method I use is to make a quick and dirty depth gauge with a shaft collar and a rod, set your quill to 0 on the scale, insert the rod till it hits the back quill screw, set the shaft collar to rim of the quill and lock t...

Before I do anything else, I still have to figure out what to do with it. I don't have anything in mind when it comes to grinding. Since you purchased a package ( lathe and mill ) I'll assume you have no tooling so here's a few ideas For the mill - True up the vice jaws ( if the package you got inc...

earlgo, it got crazy busy so I never contacted Kennametal or Small tools,
but with some more Googling it seems that the ball bearing collet nuts
are supposed to offer better concentricity and grip in seating the collet.

Thanks for the links earlgo,

I helped a friend remove a stuck endmill in a Erickson collet chuck, upon getting the endmill out and cleaning up the collet chuck I noticed there is a thrust bearing in the collet nut. Googling around I didn't find much info, on them and what that thrust bearing does but does look like it should be...

Harold V, the focusing device is thing of beauty, is the focusing mechanism rack and pinion, if so did you build that from scratch too ?
I own a few antique brass lenses for view cameras and they fine focus with a rack and pinion, coarse focusing is done thru
moving the camera's standards.

I never put my iPhone down on any work surface, it stays in my back pocket.

How big is your lathe ? A TP Grinder should be sized to your lathe.
That TP Grinder looks pretty big compared to the feet in the last picture, unless the grinder is on a table
and it's a illusion.

Nice score, a Variac is a brand name for a rheostat, it lets you vary the voltage being fed to an appliance, be it a light ( I used them a lot for set lighting ), or a motor ( probably not doing the motor any good if used that way ). I'd use some caution before firing it up. I see the variac has an ...

Russ, hammermill, thanks for chiming in, I've been looking for a drop in replacement but there's nothing out there, there are similar motors with similar specs but I don't think I have the time to wait for it arrive from China. I guess checking the continuity of the windings requires opening the mot...