When to run lathe in reverse.

You need to use reverse when your shirt sleeve, glove, long hair or your neck tie get wound up in your work!
 
I concur, running a lathe in reverse is very helpful for things such as power tapping/die-ing (not to be confused with power dying!) and chamfering, either ID or OD. Swiveling the compound to 45 towards you can make it uncomfortable on a larger lathe, so you can make it 45 away and run the lathe backwards.

Never have cut an inside thread with the rotation backwards. I just point the tool towards me and feed right-to-left, normal rotation. But then, I haven't done a great deal of ID threading.

Having reverse is also great for when you don't have a threading dial or cut metric threads on an inch machine/vise versa. Engage the half-nuts once, cut the first pass, stop the rotation and pull the tool away, reverse back to your start position. On my Atlas with a threaded spindle, I made a hand crank to accomplish the same thing, as it has no reverse to begin with. Putting it in "neutral" to the motor doesn't disengage the feed gears, fortunately.
 
I run the lathe in reverse when I'm cutting a bevel on the edge of a bore. It saves time in moving the cutting tool.
 
I used to run some 1/2 dia x 12 long shafts 1000 pcs at a time. First I used a 5c lever collet with a spindle stop to face to length But it took a bit of time to load them. One or two pieces no big deal but 1000 pieces the time adds up. So I went to holding shafts in a 5c collet inserted about 1/2 deep into collet against a stop with a roller steady rest. After setting the rollers I found that by reversing the spindle and setting the facing tool upside down I only needed to use the 2 bottom steady rest rollers as the cutting forces would force the shafts down into the rollers. I then ran the parts without stopping the spindle and cut the loading time down to seconds. That made a big difference in production.

So running in reverse can make a difference.

Jimsehr
 
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