What Machine Tools Are You Buying and Why?

[David2011]

I almost bought one but I could not think of enough uses to justify. Can you educate me on this? What would you (or me) typically use this for in a home shop? For what projects have you required this?

Although I’m short on space I would love to have a surface grinder. Assuming that the shop already has a lathe, mill and small tools like bench grinders and a drill press, I consider the surface grinder to be the #3 machine tool. The need for one can come up on short notice. They can bail you out of difficult problems. Last week I made some washers with a 2.70” OD that had a target thickness of 0.143” and had to hit that dimension on the lathe. Due to the difficulty of parting off something with a wall thickness of almost .700” it took 4 tries to get 2 washers that weren’t under the thickness dimension.

With a surface grinder I would have faced off one side and partially parted the second side around .160” and finished parting with a saw. From there it’s easy to finish it with the surface grinder. They’re great any time that milling might work except that holding the part is difficult. The magnetic chuck is almost a miracle worker.

 

[matthewsx]

I have a little Hilco tool grinder I’ve often thought about fitting as a surface grinder. Worth a try now I guess since I have a kiln for heat treating now.

John

 

[David2011]

To the original question, I had machines that did what I needed but sold them when I moved about 700 miles. The cost to have them moved exceeded their value. I knew what I wanted when I started shopping for replacements. Used machinery is not as readily available on the Gulf Coast as it is in the Great Lakes and Eastern states. Someone that I knew was upgrading and offered me his old lathe (one owner, about 10 years of hobby use) at a decent price. I knew it would be a temporary machine but it was infinitely better than no lathe. Same with buying a mill. I wanted a full sized knee mill but wasn’t finding much that was decent and under $5000. A mill-drill showed up on Marketplace, it looked decent and I bought it.

Both machines did a good enough job but eventually the work outgrew the machines so I found a full size knee mill and a 13x40 lathe. I didn’t mind getting older machines that didn’t look beautiful as long as they were capable of reasonably accurate work. The lathe didn’t need much work to get it going but I did take the time to paint it. The mill had several noisy bearings and I replaced most of them up to the point of finding that the spindle bearings are bad. The spindle is going back to Wells-Index this week for bearings and evaluation/regrinding of the R-8 taper. It’s ended up being more of a project and expense than I had hoped but it will be a great machine when the spindle and quill com back.

 

[SouthernChap]

@projectnut , this is a really interesting question, and has sharpened a line of thinking that has been popping into my head recently on reading some of the posts on this forum recently.

Fear not! To avoid polluting this thread with my related but tangential thoughts, I'll post those in another thread.

So, to answer the OP, since I'm stubbornly currently in the process of testing my principle that: "I've damn well got this 7x14 mini-lathe, so I'm going to fettle, improve and add upgrades to it as much as I can, then use it for as long as I can, before its limitations make me get something more capable", a new-to-me old-English-iron lathe is off the table of purchases for the time being.

So, I'm currently looking for a milling machine. I simply cannot fit a medium/large mill (and I consider the mini Bridgeport type mills as medium) in my workshop (I've got all that bloody plastic to find a home for!). So I'm looking for something compact. I'm also a bit budget limited so it's used for me. Even if I wasn't budget limited, we don't have an equivalent to PM here in the UK; Warco is probably the nearest, but I'd put them only a little bit beyond Grizzly in terms of standards. Having burned a fair bit of time on sorting out the Chinese 7x, I don't want to have to repeat the process with a mill.

To that end I'm on eBay and Facebook marketplace looking for a good deal on something like one of the RF25 or RF30 clones, or possibly one of the more compact Adcock and Shipley horizontal machines, but only if they have a vertical head accessory included in the sale (the vertical heads are rocking horse poo; apparently they tended to have been chucked in a cupboard when industrial company bought the machines, and then chucked in a skip 20 years later during the clear-outs such companies have).

I am currently in discussion with someone about a really quite tidy Astra L2/L4 (not the one @Ben17484 had, I should say) with a good chunk of tooling and a vertical head. I'll find out later today if I can get it for about £400. It's about an hour's drive away, and it's compact enough to fit in my car with the rear seats down. It's also not going to be difficult to fit in my workshop and possible to move into position in my workshop without major drama.

The lack of a quill or fine feed on the vertical head may well turn out to be a PITA but eh, for the price and the rigidity of the machine (as compared with say a mini-mill or even an RF clone perhaps), I reckon it's a potentially good purchase.

One thing about the above that is germane to some of the implicit points in the OP by @projectnut, is that the reason I got into this hobby is a love of the problem-solving process. Coming up with a modification to enable fine Z movement, is just the kind of problem solving that floats my boat (I have some ideas already and you can bet if I score this machine, you'll be seeing posts about that topic).

Funnily enough, the mention in this thread of the surface grinder being indispensable is something I can relate to; specifically as an owner of a 7x14 Chinese mini-lathe. Having access to a surface grinder would make some of the more vital fettling tasks much, much easier. But then who has a 7x Chinese mini-lathe and a surface grinder?

I'd love a surface grinder (for the above reason and also just because ) and it seems the usual used suspects are not wildly expensive, but they're all quite big buggers; there don't seem to be that many compact examples available. I've seen one benchtop surface grinder I could probably have fitted into my workshop on an engineering auctions company's website but it sold before I got the chance to bid on it.

I also fancy one of the little BCA jig borers but they always go for well over £1000 and there's the space issue again (I have to have some workbench space free! ) so that's a pipe dream for now.

 

[projectnut]

Like many others I do enjoy resurrecting a machine if I think it's something that will get regular use in the future. However, I can't see stuffing money in a machine just to try to flip it. In this area used machines in good shape are still plentiful. I doubt I could make a profit and would more than likely not break even given the prices and condition of machines currently on the market. The few machines that I did outgrow were ones that were given to me. When I no longer had a use for them, I passed them along to others for the same price.

I do find I use the surface grinder more than I originally expected. Mine happened to come from a shop that was using it to grind spacers for the lower ends of Mercury inboard/outboard engines. It's first job in my shop was to thin down spacers for the horizontal mill. Later it started getting used to sharpen end mills and Ford Uniflute countersinks. I've also used it to make specialty tools and step keys. It's not the most used machine in the shop, but it does get enough to justify its presence.

It took quite a while to find the right machine for the shop. Many were too big to get into the shop while others were in poor shape. I happened across a Sanford 6 x 12 machine in good condition. As mentioned earlier it was being used in a shop that repaired Mercury lower units. The owner wanted to retire, but Mercury kept sending him unsolicited business. He thought the only way to discourage them was to be unable to do the work because he no longer had the machines.

This machine is compact enough that it easily fits in the space available. It's easy and relatively inexpensive to run. I must admit I do now have in excess of 50 different grit and hardness wheels for the machine, as well as profilers, fixtures, and other setup tools. This is another case where the cost of the tooling is near the cost of the machine itself.

Here are a few pictures of the Sanford:

 

[TimHarrison]

I have bought machines needing restoration if they were priced right and the right machine for the current need, I would prefer to buy fully working though.
Mostly I try to find industrial type machines as they are more likely to be decent quality and often more economical as they are too big for many home shops.
My wish list at the moment if something comes up at the right price is a 48 inch sheet metal guillotine, a bead roller and a shaper. None are urgent though.

 

[rwm]

That Sanford is a beauty. Sounds like precision washer and spacer would be the most common use.

 

[SouthernChap]

Like many others I do enjoy resurrecting a machine if I think it's something that will get regular use in the future. However, I can't see stuffing money in a machine just to try to flip it. In this area used machines in good shape are still plentiful. I doubt I could make a profit and would more than likely not break even given the prices and condition of machines currently on the market. The few machines that I did outgrow were ones that were given to me. When I no longer had a use for them, I passed them along to others for the same price.

I do find I use the surface grinder more than I originally expected. Mine happened to come from a shop that was using it to grind spacers for the lower ends of Mercury inboard/outboard engines. It's first job in my shop was to thin down spacers for the horizontal mill. Later it started getting used to sharpen end mills and Ford Uniflute countersinks. I've also used it to make specialty tools and step keys. It's not the most used machine in the shop, but it does get enough to justify its presence.

It took quite a while to find the right machine for the shop. Many were too big to get into the shop while others were in poor shape. I happened across a Sanford 6 x 12 machine in good condition. As mentioned earlier it was being used in a shop that repaired Mercury lower units. The owner wanted to retire, but Mercury kept sending him unsolicited business. He thought the only was to discourage them was to be unable to do the work because he no longer had the machines.

This machine is compact enough that it easily fits in the space available. It's easy and relatively inexpensive to run. I must admit I do now have in excess of 50 different grit and hardness wheels for the machine, as well as profilers, fixtures, and other setup tools. This is another case where the cost of the tooling is near the cost of the machine itself.

Here are a few pictures of the Sanford:

Flipping restored machines in the UK might be a viable business model, given how many perfectly good machine tools were scrapped in the 70s and 80s as our industrial sector was first crippled in the 70s by unions with a political agenda (an agenda I have some mild theoretical sympathy but no practical sympathy with) and then annihilated by greedy asset strippers taking advantage of the naive libertarian policies (again theoretical sympathy but not practical sympathy) enacted by the union-hating (with understandable reasons) government of the 80s.

It's not something I'd be interested in. This is my hobby and I buy machine tools to use, even if that use is not necessarily considered the most efficient by some.

I occasionally buy small bits of tooling or accessories that I have no specific use for because they appeal to me or for sentimental reasons (I bought a 1970s, clear yellow plastic handled Stanley flat head screwdriver in quite good nick because it was the same one my father used; I have a much better equivalent screwdriver so I didn't need it and probably won't use it but eh, it was about £7 on eBay).

That Sandford is a bit taller than the benchtop Jones and Shipman surface grinder I was looking at but missed, but a similar footprint; maybe a bit smaller on the x dimension perhaps.

 

[FOMOGO]

I guess for me it boils down to the little devil, and angel sitting on my shoulders whispering in my ears. "Oh it looks so forlorn, and it will go to scrap if you don't save it", or "The wife won't mind one more machine, you only have 15 or 20, and you have plenty of room". In the end I guess I just enjoy the process of the hunt, acquisition, and restoration, even if it is painfully slow at times. Mike

 

[Jimsehr]

I often buy them for the tooling that comes with them. The tooling is often worth more than the machine. That means I end up with more tooling than I will ever use. But I would rather have to much tooling then not enought.