John any ideas on what your first lathe project will be?
First project will be me...recover ...:lmao:
Then...where do I start...basically building/organizing some sort of a shop.
Getting my little machine shop mini mill down (my mini machine shop was in my hobby room upstairs...heated..building a wall to separate the garage into a room to keep the machines at, at least, a minimum temperature.
In between all that going through all steps of checking out the lathe, fiddle here and there with the little material I have in bigger stuff than for a 7X12 lathe...sorta gotta get 'geared' again towards this size.
Luckily, thinking ahead, I brought home a bunch of real big bolts and nuts from projects I worked on. They are shipping bolts and assembly bolts for wind turbines and vary from 1" - 2" o.d. about 10" length.
Lots of practice for interrupted cuts and parting off. hehheh.
Still waiting for toolbits to come in so for now all I have is a 3/4 parting blade and 1/2" hss stuff. I never worked with indexable but I think I wanna go there, but they're not here yet.
So much more tooling to get for this size, but it'll happen...3/4 is a bit of a step up and I don't have anything that big....in tooling..
)
Boring bars and you name it...all have to be get. Scouting ebay a lot here..hehheh
(if anybody has a great offer on tooling in the cxa size...I'm all ears!)
Oh! probably first 'project' will be a handle for the cxa toolpost! Yep, really need to get a boring bar quick.
I am, for some reason, kinda obsessed with threading and that was not really possible with the mini lathe accurately, but now...oh boy!
Little downfall on the 1640 is the lack of an extensive gearbox but that doesn't hinder me much....changing gears is easy and doesn't take much time, plus I consider that 'fiddling' and I enjoy that.
This is purely a hobby and in no shape or form a business so I promised myself to not go overboard on pumping money into tooling and such...it'll take time.
On the other hand...if it's worth doing...it's worth overdoing...:lmao:
I'm sure that, along the line, I'll run into all sorts of problems that I'll try to make you guy's problems at that point!
)
So that's, roughly, my 'timeline' for projects.
John