Home Made Lathe Part 2

Homemade Lathe

Part 2

Originally I thought that I'd just need the 2 upright castings, both bolted to the base. Obviously this wasn't going to be very sturdy and required some modification.

I lined up the uprights, and carved out 2 skirts in foam that would be casted and bolted in place to stabilize the whole affair. In the process I did end-up using my drill press and a cross-slide vise as a crude milling machine. The finish was adequate to machine all matching surfaces for a reasonable fit.

Knowing now what I do, I certainly would have done the foam forms quite differently. My next lathe will be just two huge castings not four, and be considerably wider with less emphasis on a tight fit to the I-Beam face, as bolts hold it in place regardless.

Here is how I bored the Headstock. It doesn't look like anything is close to being lined-up, but the holes did end-up parallel to the I-Beam face. Obviously this is a posed shot as the drill bit is not centered in the first hole. I think the angle and shadow of the hole contribute to the illusion.

I do admit that the head-stock assy is slightly off square from the base, but again no where near as bad is this picture shows.

I was quite pleased with how well the cross-slide vise worked when mounted in place. Once the Countershaft and Motor are mounted and in place. I'll remount the Cross-Slide temporarily as I clean-up the parts and try and get some better machining on parts before I ruin my drill press.

In the process of milling the skirts I must have either bent the spindle or deformed the chuck as it has a wicked wobble that deflects over 30thou with a dial-gauge, and I have to pound it back into place. The best I can get is down to a 10thou wow which makes the bench shake when drilling heavy material.

I cut two pieces of angle iron about 4" in length, and cut out a 2" slot in each. These were carefully welded to the remaining frame of the Countershaft.

Initially I was going to get quite fancy and weld some nuts on their sides to allow for tensioning the belt with screws, but ended up just bolting it into place as I used the weight of the lathe to set the tension as I lifted.

The drive pulley on the countershaft is the first real part that I cast, unfortunately it is bored slightly off-center so it will need either immediate machining or replacement. The Belt doesn't visibly become slack when turning, but you can feel an increase in resistance as you turn it by hand.

The motor mount I originally was going to use was a casted piece that would bolt to the skirt on the headstock. It had some mechanical issues that either required major changes to the countershaft and motor placement, or lots of machining on the casting itself. It would have been weakened and likely broke soon, so I opted for a quick weld-job on the base of the motor and bolting a heavy hinge to the skirt where the original mount would have been.

I ran it like this for about 15 minutes showing the wife and kids that it did work. At this point I have a fair amount of truing-up of parts as there is quite a bit of shaking from wonky pulleys.

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