Plus there's room above and behind the lathe. Right now wasted on your window. Just leave an opening so you can get to and see the protractor below the compound., for setting angles. Otherwise you have to climb over everything to be able to view/set it. Why the markings were put in the least access able place, I never understood. Or make a protractor jig and cover the entire rear of the machine. we will need pics of whatever you come up with. Those are very nice lathes, btw
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Making Use Of The Space Below My Logan 850 Lathe
- Thread starter intjonmiller
- Start date
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2015
- Messages
- 894
Maintain at least a 4" kick space for two reasons. One is the actual kick space. The other is that sooner or later (Murphy says sooner) you are going to drop something in front of the lathe The odds that anything dropped in front of the lathe will roll or bounce underneath increases as the clearance to look for it decreases.
Absolutely. That's exactly how I've done all of my shop cabinets (with a toe-kick board to prevent anything from going all the way under), but I may have overlooked that for this unique project if you hadn't said something. Thanks.
The position in front of the window is theoretically temporary, but it's hard to identify anywhere better for it. Where I would most like to put it in a corner (open on the left, wall on the right) has cabinets right above it which would make a good place to mount a light, but that would make it harder to get into anything I want to store behind it, and I have plans to do some youtube videos of some of the projects I have in mind, so that would also limit camera positions. I could remove the cabinets, replacing them with something smaller and higher, but that's a tough sell when there are already perfectly good cabinets there. If I go left of the window as it is right now then it will be immediately next to the surface grinder, which is the hardest thing in my shop to move, and one of the biggest obstructions, so I keep it by the overhead door opening instead of back near the table saw and other things that have to be moved regularly as I work on different things. While I have a decent crap-catcher mounted on the surface grinder, I still don't think positioning a lathe right in its line of fire is a good idea. (It's a universal grinder so it spins counter-clockwise as you look at it, throwing to the right.) Currently there's a floor-standing, worn, early 1990s Harbor Freight drill press between the two. Seems like a good use for it.
The opposite wall is completely out of the question, as the entire wall is custom-built shop cabinets supporting a miter saw and continuous material support, in line and planar with a radial arm saw table as well. 8' on either side of the miter saw for long pieces. No flexibility there. The wall adjoining wall (opposite the overhead door opening) is where the rolling table saw cabinet parks, so that is the only other spot where it might make sense. The upper cabinet there is a little higher and not as deep. I'll have to play with that. I wish this thing was easier to move around to try different configurations...
Oh, and by the way, that protractor on the back of the compound is only half useful, because it only goes one way! Last night we were turning a 2MT on a temporary center (I just ordered one but it hadn't arrived yet) and that's about 1.5 degrees, but the markings are only useful if I want to cut that from the back side. I wasn't relying on those coarse marks, but they are nice for a starting point.
