Lathes and Milling Machines

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120L

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Fellow Frogger
Joined
Oct 31, 2010
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Sydney
Greetings

I'm thinking of setting up a small workshop to fiddle around with metal working.

I have a bench drill and and thinking of getting a lathe and milling machine but I really don't know what I should be looking for. The most I'd use it for is to work on cars and lawn mowers so I don't imagine that it would have to be too big.

Any advice would be very much appreciated.

Regards

Alan
 
Buy second hand, with as much tooling as possible.
You didn't mention a budget, a mill and lathe are usually two separate items, though combination machines have been made.

Hercus made good lathes and they are often for sale. They were used by the tech colleges and high schools years ago.
Hercus made a milling head and vice to use with their lathe, good for simple work.
Consider doing an "adult ed" course in the evenings, there is much to learn.

Do some research yourself with google, the woodworking forums have a metalworking and Hercus lathe section.
 
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Or just buy yourself a cheap chinese small lathe and play with that until you decide you need more.

Milling is not that cheap. You need a good crossfeed table and they are more expensive than the mill. You also need specialised tools and a lot of experimenting to learn how to use them. A course is not that necessary unless you want to do highly specialised jobs.

Playing with the machines is more important than doing the relevant course (that is if you have basic knowledge of materials and techniques and such) and utimately the course is only as good as the access to playing with the machines it facilitates.

Buying s/h is good advice, but you want to make sure the gear works fine otherwise problems can be expensive to fix.
 
Myford ML7
The English antique will do you well for a starter, bonus is they are always well regarded and resale price remains high when you are ready to move up. Just check the bed is in good nick

Myford Lathes

The True Blue Aussie Hercus brand was indeed in a lot of schools and if you can still find a 260 go for it. I ‘played’ with their old No1 Mill and it produced good results.

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If you can navigate your way around Yahoo Groups there is a bit you can pick up/learn the Hercus model 200 was a copy of the South Bend 9” so the following group may me of help to you if you stumble on one for sale.

southbendlathe9 : South Bend 9A, B, C, 10K & 10L Lathes
southbendmanual : ________* * * Manuals /Discussion* * *


Cheep Asian disposable is a Hafco AL280P ( no quality assured here ) the thing as a mill. Accuracy is a bit wobbly but to get started they come up on Gumtree etc all the time. Once you have experienced it you will probably form the opinion that dual purpose machines never quite work very well.
 
G'day,

cheap Asians are really kits, there is nearly always a mountain of work to be done before you can play in earnest. A number of relevant Yahoo groups look after these fellas and are a great source of information about how to turn a sow's ear into useful sow's ear - you'd have to damn clever or very lucky to end up with a silk purse :)

cheers
Bob
 
I learned on a Myford ML6 during the last century and I would buy one again today. Small versatile and remarkabley accurate for the low cost. More recently but also in the last century, I bought a Chinese lathe/mill which I smartly sold along with the house. It had a belt drive to the main shaft and a gear to the milling turret. It wasn't a kit but did a lot of things, all badly. The patience needed to take out play to get some sort of accuracy was just not justified. The mill was close to useless because of the limited space on the lathe table to mount an reasonable dividing head, XY table or workpiece. The motor died of young age and I found that the frame size was an obscure Chinese one and so I had to make some serious modifications to handle the shorter fatter and more common motors.
Keep away from these, is my advice.
My present lathe is Chinese made and I bought it from a reputable Italian supplier. It has no quality issuesat all and the assembly needed was minimal. For all that there was a day occupied with mounting it such that the bed was true and everything aligned. It has a proper gear box. It does have a milling attachment which shares the mountings but has its own motor and gearbox. I have bought a set of clamps for its XY table so that I can mill a variety of odd castings etc.

My advice is buy a small lathe Myford or Hercus size and learn its limitations relative to the jobs you want to do and gain expertise. Then buy the lathe of your dreams. Lathes have a basic problem shared by cameras, computers, cars and lots of other capital items. Once you buy them you stuck with them but there is always one better on the market. Specifically, no matter what size lathe you buy, you will always find a job to do that is too big or too small and you wish that you had another one.
In the car scene a serious restoration demands the ability to skim drums or disks, true flywheels and perhaps crankshafts. These are all beyond the swinging radius of the average home lathe or the length of bed.
Then like cameras for which you always need another lens, there is a daunting list of accessories, each one of which is a 'must have' for just one job.

Most lathes for sale new have a screw cutting facility. Very useful but very difficult to use and get the screw length right unles you have a variable speed control on the motor to supplement the clutch. This I rate a must and some day I will install mine.
 
When buying a lathe, decide what size of metal rod, that can extend back through the headstock as that will limit the size of round material and the lengths of rod you can turn (a 2 inch capacity will do most car style work, axles etc) then decide what swing space you need over the bed of the lathe, if you need to machine brake drums or discs you will need a gap bed, (space infront of the chuck) to give clearance) some larger lathes have a removable section of the lathe bed to give enough room to wring larger items in a chuck (boring piston rods etc.)

The next thing is the distance between head and tailstock, and for longer things like screw cutting, does the lathe have sets of interchangeable cogs, and ability to cut screw threads and will you need this ability, also does it come with steadies to set up shafting so it can be machined at any point between centres.

Once you get familiar with your possible requirements - go search.

Combination machines (milling and turning) are probably only hobbyist machines and limited to do any decent work. Some of the Chinese milling machines are reasonably constructed and will do reasonable work when new. I would not buy a secondhand chinese milling machine, you will still need to spend reasonable money to get a reasonable machine.

Ken
 
Thanks to all of you.

I really appreciate your comments / advise because I really don't know anything about lathes or milling machines.

Regards

Alan
 
Something else to remember is the size and power supply of the machine.

Bigger lathes and mills can be cheaper than smaller units. They are often three phase supply which is not usual in older home installs.

I've seen some bargains in smaller tool room equipment (200-300 mm swing). So if you have the space to fit in a bigger mill or lathe don't overlook commercial grade machines from Sales or Fowles auctions. If the device is belt driven and not a giant a motor swap to single phase is not a big deal.
Bigger machines are very useful for disk/drum/ flywheel work.
 
G'day Alan,

if you know zero about machine tools and machining then you start at the bottom, like us old farts did at the old fashioned tech schools :approve:

There was standard set of text books in Victoria, "Fitting and machining" published by TAFE or Technical Schools Branch, in 3 volumes, and heaps of reprints and revisions through to the eighties. There ought to be hundreds of 'em out there in secondhand places, but not many on line ? - no doubt other states had their own efforts.

Standard texts, try "Workshop technology" by Chapman, also in three volumes, and plentiful by the look of it AddALL Rare Used and Out of Print Book Search

You don't need to spend up on machine tools either, look up Dave Gingery on google. This bloke tells you how to make your own basic gear out of scrap, starting with a home made foundry ! Have a look at Building the Gingery Lathe and Gingery Milling Machine for a couple of examples.

A ready made pencil sharpener can be got locally from Taig Micro Lathe II Kit [6-1019] - $399.00 : Taig Australia, Lathes, Milling Machines and Accessories as a kit of bits only requiring minimal hand finishing and provision of a drive source.

lathe1.jpgIMG_0596.jpg

Don't compare this one to the Asian imports though, it is a precision article and the Asians are not in the race at multiple times the price of the Taig. Yes, the Asian ones will do screwcutting and have all sorts of bolt-ons that turn them into wonder machines but they are not of the same build standard. The Taig won't do anything much on a car, neither will the Asian at this price, but it will give you a cheap introduction to machining without disappointment.

Then you can think outside the square, like this......

Photo1862.jpg100_0063.jpg100_0297.jpg

cheers,
Bob
 
Bob

Thanks very much for the information. That actually sounds like a good low cost way to go forward.

I'll follow that up.

Regards

Alan
 
G'day Alan,

if you are going to try out a Taig kit you will need some lapping compound, this is the one to go with.....
1/2 Test Kit Yellow
this little kit will do the job for you.

Don't be tempted to use normal lapping compounds or raid the kitchen cupboard, this is the right stuff. As you use it, it breaks down, any residue is easy to clean up so it will not hang about to damage your nicely lapped surfaces nor does it have any nasty chemicals like the kitchen stuff may have :)

Of course, as with any machine tool, you will spend multiples of the unit cost on tooling it up :)

cheers,
Bob
 
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