And for anyone else that appreciates the effort this fellow went to. I was very impressed, and a young guy at that, just wow. Need another machine in the shop?
Nice! I'll get a pic of a small lathe her father put together wayyyyy back..........it's an antique with sentimental value to wifey. She would literally kill someone if anything ever happened to it.
Got to give the young guy absolutely top marks for cleverness, perseverance, and the final result. However, I reckon he'll eventually find, when he wants to do some real precision machining, that there's a good reason why proper lathes are made from cast iron and cast steel - and not construction grade steels. And that reason is the flexibility of construction steels, as compared to the total rigidity of cast iron and cast steel.
If doing a lot of work and interrupted cuts, hardened ways are a necessity as well as adjustable gibs to keep the slides snug
You can buy a lot of lathe for $500-1,000 if you like to work. I don't know where the video is from I suppose.
I liked that his goal was to JUST use the powered hand tools and welder. I hate hand drilling thick plate. His fixtures used to guide the grinders was great. I think it was just a proof on concept deal and maybe the normal trying to make a buck on youtube, but still some very good craftsman ship from a young fellow. If the materials were free and your broke with just those tools then maybe. The mention of cast iron versus the fabbed steel, yeah sure cast iron is pretty stable, but it still distorts, so just like a weldmet it has to have proper gussets etc. There are precision machines built from weldmets, not many machine tools though. Casting, as long as all systems are in place to do it is cheaper than welding as well.
As owner of a machine shop, I can pick that thing apart fast, but gotta appreciate the willingness to build it. I suspect he quickly found the deficiencies after putting some work on it.
Not so much. Main reason is natural resonant frequency. If you need a quick education, smack a piece of case iron with a hammer, then steel. If you made a church bell from cast iron, no one would ever hear it. We actually tune our spindle speeds based on harmonic data for each tool/holder combo. Believe it or not ,there are times we WANT to be inside the harmonic band. After watching the entire vid, it really seems like the kid has some space in his dad's real shop, and did this for views. He used tools that are not common to DIYers, and did so with experience. to be quite frank, if the kid took the money for the BOM and the tools he used, he could have just bought a real lathe. But I will totally eat yellow snow if he begged on the streets for scraps of Ibeam to build his dream. But to be more frank, the spindle is the heart of a spinny machine. It's insanely critical and I've rebuilt several precision spindles.. Precision is an understatement and I was taught by a former SKF bearing engineer that really makes me puke that he passed. I really feel he was trying to dump his knowledge on competent souls before he left. I feel it is only fair to share what he taught me. I took an extremely deep dive in bearings and precision. After all, you won't be doing any "precision" machining without precision bearings. But what seems to blow minds is that if you install ABEC9 bearings and don't adhere to ABEC9 shafting tolerances, you are F*d. Basically I can see the wobble and taper in the young man's lathe. But I most certainly would not discount several things he obviously understood in general lathe operation, which makes the whole video odd. BTW, you will absolutely never build a real lathe with axle bearings. Won't happen, can't happen.
If it works for general purpose work great but it seems like used lathe's pop up for pretty cheap.
Some church bells are cast iron. That's why they crack.
casted what exactly? There is little doubt that 100y ago, they were still trying to understand the behaviors in the martensite and austenite structures. Very sadly Tesla had much of this figured out but took decades of theft to understand his advanced work in harmonics.
Some really old bells are cast iron but most are a specific alloy just for bells.
It's all insanely interesting to me later in life because alloys were in big development in the 1900s. Actually the Meehanite structures that we use in modern machine tools today were developed 100y ago, but not perfected. But I very much believe old cast bell structures were a "trial" back in the day, but really, anything subjected to hourly resonance would eventually time out. As with all our aerospace work, at some point, the cycle count wins. No different than bending metal back and forth. You eventually figure out how many full cycles before it will just weaken and break off.
Apparently cast iron is a very hard material and that made it hard to form and shape back in the day.
The biggest problem with cast iron is the difficulty fixing it if it breaks off in chunks. Yes I know all the different proven methods of fixing it, but still, its expensive and very difficult in some areas. If they drop one of your huge lathes when moving it, and break that casting it then becomes worthless pretty much. Yeah maybe bolting on fish plates etc. could fix it, I think heating and welding would cause too much distortion. Personally I think too many huge expensive items are built around a cast iron frame. Big / marine medium speed engines for one. Meehanite is a trademark for an engineering process. Yes for cast iron.
I asked the wife last night about this again. I was mistaken about her father building this. He was using this when he worked for Telex making small parts. When he decided to start his own company, he bought this from Telex for $15 and took it home. He then started making parts with this in his garage.........that was back in the mid 50's.
Levin watchmakers turret lathe.
Um, yes, dropping machines is a no-no. Fixing a broke casting is a 100% no-no. You scrap em, but what are you really doing to break a casting? That consideration is never part of the decision process in buying machine tools. The more cast, the more better..... But I actually own a Mori that was dropped but only on it's feet and from a small distance. It was bad enough to knock a ton of electronics loose but it was a testament to the quality of a Mori. I fixed it and it holds tenths to this day. Meehanite indeed is a trademark, but an industry term still used today, and virtually all pro machines use it. It describes the grain structure and comp of the cast with the properties needed which is the best vibration damping and fatigue crack resistance. There are machines from the 40s that are still going. Many war era machines were insanely robust and accurate that they are reconditioned and used.
So, you guys aren't exactly talking about the same cast iron. Bells are made from nodular (ductile) cast iron like crankshafts, where as the machine bases are made from grey cast iron. The difference between the two is the shape of the carbon in the iron matrix. The carbon in Nodular cast iron is a round, spherical shape caused by a last minute addition of Magnesium to the melt that causes a dramatic chemical reaction causing the carbon to form microscopic balls. The carbon in Grey cast iron is in flakes. Grey cast is used for machine bases because it is strong and has excellent vibration dampening properties. The downside is Grey cast can be brittle. Nodular cast iron (also known as ductile iron) is considerably less brittle (as the name implies) , but the spherical shape of the carbon allows for noise and vibration to resonate through. So, comparing bells to machine bases is like comparing apples and oranges, they aren't the same cast iron. And @fastline is correct, cycles kill everything. Everything has a cycle count at which failure will occur. I've personally calculated it for rotating shafts. The number of cycles to failure might be something in the millions, or hundreds of millions, but there is a finite life. As for the homemade lathe, that guy has more perseverance and time than I do. I would have saved a little longer and bought something used.
Just like steel there are different forms of cast iron. I watched a video in the past of a successful repair of a large machine base. Cracks were beveled and the base was braced to hold everything in perfect alignment. To do the repair they heated the cast iron and used spray welding with a powdered cast iron similar to the base metal. You almost couldn't tell it was repaired. Probably not a cheap repair but a lot cheaper than a new machine and it saved the machine from being scrapped. Some types of cast iron can be successfully repaired but you have to follow the proper procedure to a T.
One of the last places I worked, same deal they bought a "dropped" Mori, huge Mill Turn. Not sure it there were cracks or not, never went under it to look. It took awhile for the Mori guys to get it close to aligned though. I don't know what the altitude it was dropped from either, not sure if it was a line broke or slipped brake or what caused the drop. That has to be the worse nightmare of moving machine tools.
If you can spot the vid, I might like to see it! Things are possible but I know how pro machines are built and usually is either not possible, are will have only marginal results. The reality is machine tool castings are casted, then aged for many months, then and only then can they be machined to micron tolerances, and those precision surfaces are what things like the linear rails are mounted to. Even being off by .0010" is not acceptable. On some other parts, I suppose one could try to shim things but to be honest, it takes a lot to break these castings! They don't just support the machine, they are way huge to absorb vibrations and ensure absolutely no deflections under load. Only someone that has dealt with a "floppy sloppy Haas" can understand when castings and rails are skimped. They suck!
I don't know if I can find it but I'll look. It was part of the base that broke and not a machined part of the machine.
Your not kidding! It is insanely stressful. We do all our own moves and calculate for days. I sometimes have to calm my shaking legs on a forklift. The goal is to get them to the ground as fast as possible. I am planning to move a 40k lb HMC soon.
Guys, don't forget there is cast steel too!
I couldn't find the video of the machine base that was spray welded but there are several video's on spray welding cast iron. Lots of heat and controlled cooling is very important.
Re the bearings, the most impressive shaft bearings I've come across were in a WW2 Landis cylindrical grinder. It was destined to be scrapped because the guy who owned it dropped dead and not a single person was interested in the Landis - yet it was still in excellent working order. I saved it with a bid of $500 and it cost more than that to move it, because it weighed 7 tonnes. But my machinist buddy and I fixed the little things that were wrong with it, and it was joy to see it working with such deadly precision - even after more than 65 years since it rolled out for Wartime work.