- Joined
- Dec 22, 2015
- Messages
- 561
Well I've been playing (I mean working) with the new lathe and I must say this is a big improvement over my smaller lathe in many respects and I am discovering some new issues that I hope to resolve soon.
The biggest improvements over the small lathe are parting and thread cutting. Parting is a piece of cake (watch this come back and bite me in the butt), no shaking, vibrating or other scary things. It just slices through the steel like it should. Thread cutting is now a pleasure too. With my little lathe I would have to take very light cuts, like 0.001" or 0.002" when cutting deeper threads and sometimes it would still jam and the drive belts would slip. Plus the lowest speed on the small lathe was 150 rpm. The new lathe has a spindle speed of 60 rpm and easily takes 0.010" cuts even plunge cutting in the deeper threads, that I was having issues with before.
One of the latest issues is that the tail stock will slide away from the work piece. This happens quite often, especially when drilling. My small lathe never had this issue even with larger drill bits. I cleaned the underside of the ways, underside of the TS and the hold down clamp to see if that would help and it did somewhat but the issue still occurs sometimes. I even tried cleaning the surface of the ways to give the TS a better grip on them but thought this was a bad idea since the TS needs to slide on the ways plus my small lathe ways always have a light coat of oil on them and it is not a problem on it. Hoping this will just work itself in. Time will tell. I still have around 5 months to figure it out.
The biggest improvements over the small lathe are parting and thread cutting. Parting is a piece of cake (watch this come back and bite me in the butt), no shaking, vibrating or other scary things. It just slices through the steel like it should. Thread cutting is now a pleasure too. With my little lathe I would have to take very light cuts, like 0.001" or 0.002" when cutting deeper threads and sometimes it would still jam and the drive belts would slip. Plus the lowest speed on the small lathe was 150 rpm. The new lathe has a spindle speed of 60 rpm and easily takes 0.010" cuts even plunge cutting in the deeper threads, that I was having issues with before.
One of the latest issues is that the tail stock will slide away from the work piece. This happens quite often, especially when drilling. My small lathe never had this issue even with larger drill bits. I cleaned the underside of the ways, underside of the TS and the hold down clamp to see if that would help and it did somewhat but the issue still occurs sometimes. I even tried cleaning the surface of the ways to give the TS a better grip on them but thought this was a bad idea since the TS needs to slide on the ways plus my small lathe ways always have a light coat of oil on them and it is not a problem on it. Hoping this will just work itself in. Time will tell. I still have around 5 months to figure it out.