What Lathe Would You Like to See Built?

It IS a beautiful machine, I don't care what you call it. :)

I like the utilitarian nature of the machine. And also like the fact that it isn't based on a hundred (or more) year old design.

It definitely gave me a few ideas.

Bill
 
I don't want to rain on the parade, because I am really enjoying the thread and seeing what options/capabilities people like/wish for on their lathes, but for the life of me I can't see how anyone could fit this into a $1500 budget. I am currently rebuilding a Delta Rockwell 11 lathe and I'm getting close to $2500 just replacing bearings, bushings, shafts, a few gears, and cleaning the thing up. Even if you do your own machine work in building, say, the headstock, I'm having a tough time seeing how you save anything over a mass-produced modern product or refurb of some older American iron. I hope you keep this thread alive, or make a new one when you actually start the build, because I'd love to see the end product and a record of the costs involved.

Just a thought for the bed though. You can purchase a 24" or 36" (center-to-center) bed with hardened ways for a Delta Rockwell 10 or 11" lathe for under $200. They are wide, heavy, solid, and those with hardened ways are often in very good condition with little wear in the ways. You could design around it for the rest of the lathe and spend more bucks on other components. The ways are designed similar to your CAD design, but without the T-slots front and rear. I agree with eightball about the gibs. Your CAD design doesn't allow for carriage gibs, at least not that I can see from your drawing.
 
not raining at all (you Debby Downer!). I think the thread is more of a what would you like to see in a deisgn. I personally like CAD work, so i figured once it has a form, more people would comment and the design could grow. I already want to add an Z motion in the lathe head stock, much like the Brrker i own... cant believe i dint think of that before. Have a few more ideas i'd like to flesh out.
I didn't think about making these, more like a mental exercise... until i checked that my mill has 31" x travel! so with some mods, i think i could machine one, then have it sent for grinding. but i want to get the other parts designed first. I already think that i can use a 3x8x36 piece of durabar and machine the bed with a few changes.

the t-slots on the back is something i grabbed from my P&W. it has slots for relieving and taper attachments, and added work hold down capability.

the slot on the front are an idea i got from my cinncy 1-d, which uses them mainly as trips, and i thought that was a good idea too. And since most small lathes are bought with the idea of converting too CNC, having one ready made to convert makes sense, and using steppers instead of change gears... i think guys would pay for that as a kit!
 
One way to hit that target $1500 is through getting stuff that leverages mass production with what is termed COTS (commodity off the shelf) parts and assemblies. I picked up a replacement 7x lathe spindle for a project (added some pillow blocks and a chain sprocket for a 4th axis for a CNC mill that never seems to get worked on). The spindle was $40. If I were to make my own out of say 4130, a 10"-12" piece of 3" stock from Onlinemetals would set me back $73 or even just 1018 would be $57. (yes I could do better with drops on ebay-- but you get the idea.) Then I would have my time in on making it. Not really any way to come out ahead on that.

I was going to pick up some stuff for my headstock and for $120, I just said forget it and bought a complete headstock and have the old one to rebuild at my leisure for a home built lathe project in the future. I couldn't come close to 3x that price building one.

On a similar vein, If I were in a hurry, I could pick up a small lathe at HF as a base to build on for very little money.

Something like this:

image_23567.jpg
With a 20% off coupon, it would come in at $150 or so. Add a precision bed or some linear rails and you could have the start of a nice little CNC lathe for light work comparable to the Sherline or Taig range but with quite a bit more capacity at 10"x18". I have even considered doing that with my 12x36 wood lathe but prefer to keep it as it is.

image_23567.jpg
 
When i originally spec'd out $1500, it was meant as a rough guideline. there are a lot of very capable import lathes in that price range. Lathemaster's 8x14, Harbor Freight's 8x12, Grizzly's 10x22, Busy Bee's 10x18 and any of the 9x20's. All of them have some standout features and all of them have some areas for improvement. i honestly haven't run each and every one of those machines, but i did do a ton of research. product reviews, forums, spec sheets, owner mods, historical websites... you name it, i dug through it, including everything that i could find on the vintage american iron, since a lot of the used machinery falls into this price range. the one thing that i noticed was that each had shortcomings. a lot of which would not be that difficult or expensive to modify if it was a fresh build. with the exception of another pound of cast iron a little different mold and another couple passes of the surface grinder, adding another v-way is not a big deal. increasing the size of a spindle and subsequent larger bearings (to have a larger spindle bore) is also a relatively inexpensive improvement when done at the manufacturing level.

so, that's what the point is here. to see what we can come up with that has the least amount of shortcomings, the best value in it's class, the broadest amount of usefulness and would hopefully be obtainable to a person who might not have the opportunity or the funds to ever buy another lathe. i would like to see something that isn't looked upon by professional machinists as a toy, but as a viable piece of machinery that just happens to be available to anyone, something that's easily up-gradable, eminently rebuildable and just plain fun to use.

to keep the price down may mean starting with a "base" model, just a high quality bare bones manual machine. Instead of starting with a base model and figuring out how to upgrade it, we're starting with the upgraded model and we can turn it in to a "chopper" for lack of a better term. just what's needed to run and nothing else if need be. as an example: the machine might not be CNC out the door, but there's no reason that the mounting bosses for stepper motors or pulley's behind quick-release hand wheels couldn't already be there...

this started as mainly a thought exercise, a "what if" scenario to get people thinking and dreaming... who know's, it may end there or it may take on a life of it's own and we may be seeing these for sale in the next couple of years... either way, i'm enjoying it!
 
I would settle for a 10x20 range lathe with separate threading and drive screws, power feed on both axis', both directions. D1-3 or 4, 1.5" spindle bore, 5" three jaw, 6" four-jaw, steady, follower, variable speed spindle 50-2500, quick-change gear box with NO change gears or electronic leadscrew. And around 400-450 lbs.

I'd give good money for that, 3k-4k. I don't have the room for or need a one or two ton piece of iron in my garage. I want decent quality, full-featured tools scaled down for the home shop type (me) to make small to med sized parts.

Apparently, there's no market for those types of machines, or something like this simply can't be done. Sucks to be me.

Bill
 
The features I have been talking about are available but they are also in the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" range. Something really modern in a manual lathe (using the term manual loosely) would be something in the range of the Knuth Servoturn:

[video=youtube_share;K7GaZcml64Q]http://youtu.be/K7GaZcml64Q[/video]

I think it is really super sexy but at the 30K or so range it kind of stretches what a hobbyist can afford. :) I do think that something in the small range with (somewhat) similar features would be feasible to build at a hobbyist price though.



The sad thing is that there used to be enough small foundries to actually produce a metal lathe fairly easily. Just make your patterns and if you only needed a few they would pour a few extras when they were doing some other jobs. There are a few places left but most want to only do large orders. The few that I have seen any pricing for that do small runs would be in the range of about $0.30/lb starting for the metal and then whatever they charge for setup and casting. Then you have to transport and machine them.

An example would be http://www.clinchrivercasting.com/home.html

I just think it would be really hard to get the numbers to work out to make it go beyond a mental exercise out of metal as you can't get the volume to come out anywhere near a reasonable price point. An alternative if you were really going to produce some machines would be to base on an existing model like one of the SIEG or Real Bull designs and purchase raw castings to build out to whatever spec you wanted (or have them do it for you).
 
Watched the video: Impressive. Also glad to see that my thoughts on what a modern lathe should be are shared by others. Knew that Something Better was out there. But modern tech won't be affordable by me in my lifetime.

I have seen a lot of what can be done, after spending most of my life designing real-time embedded systems and interfacing with servo and tribology engineers in the storage industry. I helped design a six DOF system that had positional repeatability measured in the millionths (by laser interferometer) for DARPA over 20 years ago. Why can't we get some of this in our stuff?

I guess I should shut up and be happy with my museum piece. :)

Thanks for the peek into the future,
Bill
 
hope you're not giving up now, this was not only fun, but i learned alot from this thread.
 
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