The half nuts are for threading, the power feed is a different mechanism that runs off the same long, threaded rod. It uses the groove to get it's motion, not the threads.
Rule #3: Always tuck in your shirt tale and never wear a tie. They can easily get caught in the lead screw and pull you into the machine in a heartbeat. I had it happen only once. Rule #4: Never try to remove chips with your fingers while cutting or any other time. Rule #5: Don't get into the habit of using your hand to stop a rotating chuck after you shut lathe "OFF".
RULE #6 : "Ron White is RIGHT!!" This applies to all 5 rules above : "You can't fix stupid!" (But hopefully you can get it to the ER in time!!)
Here is the photo , sorry . This is my lathe , it does everything I need and could ask for . The image is of my Buddy , he had a LaBlond Regal , unbuttoned sleeve , and the spinning chuck snagged him . He has had 2 fingers removed and the lathe was sold . He was an Aviation Machinist for 30 years . On slack second and this is the result .
I'll bet that hurt right away !!!! Accidents happen fast !! Bet it was over before he knew it happened
I've seen the results of more than one involvement with spinning machine equipment including a drill press due to loose fitting clothes or long hair. One was a broken arm because his three sizes oversize hoody got a sleeve caught in a piece of equipment. We got the machine stopped with the panic button but had to take it apart to get his arm out. That was the same machine that had grabbed the loose skin on my arm a few weeks before and tried to drag my arm in but one of the guys was quick to hit the panic button. I had a T shirt on as that was what I wore inside the plan.
I have a "later than that" 6" Craftsman lathe. I use it quite bit, today even. (Not the actual one, just never took a picture of mine.) I put a modern quick-change tool post on it, so I can change indexable tools.
Just watched it again, missed it the first time . I thought the stock was riding on the roller. Would this have been all that's needed to prevent the whip
Like some others here I have a South Bend 9 inch...I make mostly bike stuff...But it is limited, cannot turn brake drums or rotors..
Used to work with a POS who was more mouth than brains... always left the chuck keys in the chucks of the lathe and drill press; fixed that problem with spring loaded chuck keys.
I'll second the notion that lathes are serious machines and will hurt you! Respect and knowledge can't be over stated. Being a car guy - I've gotten near everything I needed to get done on a 12X36 lathe. Bigger is always better, hard to run a big part on a small lathe, much easier to run a little part on a big lathe. Old iron can be challenging on a couple fronts, namely wear and they generally run on the slow side which isn't near optimal for carbide tooling. Lots of times it's nice to have the ability to run carbide efficiently. Generally that pushes you towards a 70's or newer era variable speed machine. Those are generally old enough to be well made and new enough to run carbide nicely. Hardened ways are always a plus! And American Iron generally beats the imported stuff hands down. YMMV
Another safety thing that can booger you, is a long chip that winds up, and can gather you up, and if it doesn't pull you into the machine, can seriously scuff you up. I got into some very hard steel a few years ago, and it cut into a fine wire that coiled up, you had to stop and cut it once in a while. This came from a pair of wheel centers that a buddy brought over for me to trim, for his 672 ci pulling truck, going to wider wheels. The truck was originally built in 1989, when he worked at a large and very old naval yard, that was very significant in WWII. So another buddy that was a whiz with a lathe, in a place with very large and quality lathes, carved him out the centers for some steel from the scrap pile, and they had never been used. They were about 1/8" too big to fit in the rims, yeah, no problem, won't take long. Chuck one up in the big South Bend and hit it with a HSS cutter, which immediately went dull. OK, let's try a carbide and feed it slow- SCREEEEEEEEE- with a cloud of smoke, and slicing off a fine wire chip. Went through four carbides to get it done, and I asked him WTF is that steel??? Battleship armor, says he, there were scraps all over the Yard. Yeah...
I have a small import lathe and as others mentioned, any lathe is better than none. But once you buy one, the expenses begin to add on if you buy new and need to start buying all the other things needed to use it. Tooling, etc., can add up quickly. Mine has a 3/4" bore in the headstock, and that's been a hindrance numerous times. But you have to go really large usually to get a bore large enough to put an axle in the chuck, or anything very large. Most will be a very large lathe just to get a 1" bore even. If you can buy a used lathe, and take someone with you whose familiar enough to be sure it's in nice shape, and runs well; it's a good way to go. Usually used lathes come with all sorts of extra tooling and chucks to make them a huge bargain. Just make sure that it's checked out if you're not familiar enough to do so yourself.
A larger lathe may be cheaper because of room or or access to install my old Leblond weighs 2 tons. It takes iron to remove iron. Then there is the 3 phase thing. But 3 phase converters are cheaper than they used to be you see them on ebay for around $200.
Like buying welders, lots of people think they can buy something small to learn with because they really don't want to spend decent money. Then they don't have much luck and never really learn anything except frustration. A small lathe will get you by for modifying bolts and making small bushings. They won't do much beyond that without a whole lot of effort and "frustration". They don't have the power to turn the parts while making decent size cuts, so anything you do takes LOTS of smaller cuts. Its often hard to get decent finishes. They often don't hold dimensions well because they aren't rigid enough. The tooling is usually the rudimentary slotted T post type which in itself is inefficient and often insufficient. When you get any kind of machine for cutting metal, be it a lathe or a mill, one of the MAJOR concerns will be getting decent tooling for it. Instead of buying a small lathe and wasting money on tooling to use with it, get a decent (12" minimum swing) 13" or hopefully a 15" swing. Bigger than 15" is often cheap but hard to do small parts.Yep, its bigger and costs more...........but it will always be worth what you paid for it (or more) later on as long as it works ok. It takes a substantial committment to wait for a decent lathe to come along and step up and buy it. If its a good one/good deal, it won't last long on Facebook. You often can get some tooling with it. At a minimum you need a 4 jaw chuck and a 3 jaw chuck. A faceplate is nice too. You will also need a "live center" and a drill chuck that fit in the tailstock. The Clausing pictured above (DeathRowDave) is a nice machine. I had one and sold it to a friend who still has it. I replaced it with a longer and bigger 15" Clausing. Still occasions arise when I could use bigger, but it does 99% of anything I ever need. Its worth more than I paid for it and I've had it for 10-15 years. Tooling for these can be expensive if bought individually, so best if you can get whatever tooling is available when you buy one. Look for industrial auctions and go to a few of them. Don't jump on the first thing you see. Estate sales often offer a lathe and all the tooling too. Don't buy a really small lathe to learn on..............its like trying to learn how to mow grass using a really small push mower. Yes you will learn something, but it really doesn't help much when you get on a nicely equipped zero turn and do the same thing better in 1/10 the time.
Yep, look for one that comes with a lot of tooling- estate sales are usually very good, there were several retired old-time Mare Island machinists that lived out by me, and all had at least one lathe, and maybe a Bridgeport, and tons of tooling, Kennedy boxes etc. One old boy had a South Bend a little smaller than mine, and a very nice, tight 12x36 that he made gun barrels on. He also had a huge old rock saw in another room. One who is still around built race car frames and did precision machining, and worked off his engine work and parts from a local shop by doing precision work like installing splayed 4-bolt SBC caps and such. He taught me the practical use for newsprint in machining
I started with a little Taig, and then was lucky to have my dad find me a 12" Craftsman. Best present I ever got was him hauling that beast all the way up to Seattle for me! Little lathes are great to learn on, and a lot of times you can exceed their capacity by getting creative. Try picking up so old Popular Mechanics Shop Notes volumes, there's plenty of neat stuff in there for the home machinist, showing guys in their garage how to do the stuff at home that they did during the week at their machinist day jobs, lol. I would highly recommend getting a quick change tool post. I spent far too much wasted time setting tool height on that old lantern post, and if you want to make parts instead of setting up tooling, you'll appreciate the investment
I was a complete amateur, and bought a cheap imported mini-lathe (7/14) because I could afford it and it would fit on the table-top spot I had. That being said, it has served me very well and does just about everything I need to do. I work mainly with brass and aluminum, so the tooling is cheap and not hard to find. I am keeping my eyes open for a larger one, but not too large because of space and weight considerations, as well as not wanting to deal with 3-phase power again. If a real good deal comes up on an appropriately-sized unit. I'll jump on it. Otherwise, I'm doing just fine with what I have, mainly because I'm at that stage in my life when I can't deal with anything large and heavy. One thing that helped : When it was a few months old, the main circuit board took a crap. Rather than send it in to get fixed or replace it, my partner who is an EE dug into it. He replaced the failed component and a few others he considered marginal, and it ran better than when new.
Some of those early Clausing 5900 Series variable-speed lathes had a hydraulic actuated VS drive. We had one of them and that one-way hydraulic control was always a problem; it was not "balanced" correctly for the opposing force of the spring on the variable sheave down in the leg. Maybe some other operators didn't have an issue, but we certainly did. Always a struggle to get it down to the lowest RPM. Most of the time, we'd get the speed close to what we needed then left it alone. However, the lathe did work good for secondary operations. We equipped ours with a collet closer which made it very handy. Also put a 2" travel indicator on a movable mount that could be positioned along the bed.
There is a good book put out by Southbend in the 40's, "how to run a lathe". Cheap copy's on ebay, a good place to learn the basics.
I built the Dave Gingery lathe from his "Shop From Scrap" series of books. 7" faceplate and 12" between centers, but it's amazing what you can do with it. I also built his four jaw chuck and steady rest. Granted, it took me a year to cast and finish all the parts to build it, but it was a good learning curve and a fun project. I'm a machinist for the Navy and use some pretty nice equipment, but there is something satisfying about using a homemade lathe.
Some small lathes have a weird cult following, and that has driven up prices to stupid levels. I looked at what I could sell my baby Craftsman for, and for that I could get a bigger machine. I am happy that I got it for free. I have about $200 in tooling for it. It came with everything but a steady-rest. I have no pressing need to get anything bigger. I have a vertical mill for most manual work, and a CNC mill for everything else. The baby lathe fills in the gaps in that nicely, and I don't have to run more power, or take up more space for bigger. For anything honkin' over-large, I have the shop down the street handle it. I don't need to own or maintain that equipment.
I put this on mine: https://www.shars.com/quick-change-tool-post-set-wedge-type-000-oxa I friend had one, and the quality seemed decent. Not a ton on money.
This Monarch that is probably well over 100 years old showed up about 70 miles from me on FB market place a few days ago. Huge lathe that at one time was belt driven from a main drive in the machine shop. As big and long as it is it doesn't have the swing that a lot of guys on here who are looking at big lathes are looking for but you could do any length of driveshaft in it. The asking is 900 but moving it might be the real challenge.
The Jalopy Journal
