Looking For Suggestions!!!! Please Read
 

I am willing and able to vastly expand the tool forums here....

I just need some advise on what forums everybody would like or any changes!

I used to have a seperate forum for Lathetalk.com and I ended up closing it down because of limited use but I am seeing more posts now and I am more then willing to expand as much as you would like...

Any suggestion?

ng
 

hi there Mr Quarterbore

how about a noob guide of some sorts
i know absolutely nothing about this stuff
i want to learn, but need some friendly, informative guidance

i think this is my first post here
and i apologize in advance for my ridiculous rantstyle

mg :ak47:

Mr. Quarterbore,

I am about to enter the retired class. I bought an old Sears - Atlas Clausing lathe several years ago and have just finished restoring it. I have played with a model maker lathe (three inch swing) for several years but with no real purpose. I would be intrested in any special tools and projects. I recently received as a Christmas gift a subscription to "Model Engine" Mag. I would be especially intrested in projects of restoring old Hit & Miss Engines which would fit nicely in the special tools request.

I purchased your CD and found it very helpful. I ordered all the parts directly from Clausing but they are apparently running out of some parts. Do you know of any one making some replacement parts like the Mitre Gear for the cross feed? That was one of the parts that Clausing told me they only have 5 more left. I wonder if making the gear out of brass would be acceptable rather than the "Pot Metal" that has been used on a lot of the parts. Granted the idea was to make some of the gears out of softer material so that if the operator made a mistake that certain parts would fail to protect other more expensive parts.

Thanks for giving those of use that want to learn a place to look.

Ol Ben

I have an interst in learing about cnc for lathes and milling machines on ahobby level using used parts and adapting where possible to hold costs down.

I see your suggestions and I will see how I can add new forums that allow this... I am not an expert on lathers and the other tools on here so really what I need to know is how I can improve the forums to allow these types of discussions to be ordered...

I can give you a home... but I need to rely on the members to fill the house up when it comes to these tools.

Ol Ben,
I am an old machinist by trade. I have run a lathe quite a bit and will
be willing to help around here were I can. Quarterbore and I have had a
little dealings as well.

As far as the gear in question, you can have them made by a custom
gear shop. (job shop type people) there are many of them around the country. I have used several out of the Houston area for the smaller gears.
Roger on the material for the weak link. A company that I used to work for
had a very large lathe. 20 foot swing with 65 feet of bed. Anyway, the primary
drive off the motor was a fiber gear (fenolic) I had quite a few of them made
during the years I was there. It is good to stay with similar materials. If you are talking about the cross slide gear, it could be brass as this is not really
where the shear would probably occur. I have seen some carriages that have a shear pin that the gear drives with. This would be the weak link so to speak.
You would have to send the old gear/grears in for a sample when and if you
needed one, to have them made. Gears are a crazy thing as as they go up in
diameter and number of teeth, you have to use an different cutter (hob). The
gear buisness is pretty much that gears as there is so much involved in tooling up to do them they pretty well have to specialize in order to justify the cost of the tooling. Some times you can get lucky and if it is an american made gear and has a common pitch and number of teeth you can find a
similar gear in the Dodge or Martin cataloges. Most of your good bearing houses (people that sell bearings for a living) should have a cataloge.


Wrangler
There is nothing cheap about CNC stuff. It is all higher than giraffe stuff.
You can spend $10,000.00 on just programming software. I know we have done that:cool: You can get into it on a very small scale with a bridgeport type mill with two axis programming fairly cheap. Each axis you add is more and more money as well as size. It is a very interesting venture to play with
and the new software makes it fairly easy if you are good with Autocad and so on. You can write a very complicated program in a few hours which would have taken day or weeks to do in the old G codes. There are a lot of good
classes put on by local industry in some areas that you might take on the basics of machining. I have found that it is a very personally rewarding thing
to do and work at. While I was a machinist for a number of years, I have move up through the ranks so to speak and do very little hands on stuff anymore, other than my own stuff or some special prototyping.

Have you done much with the smaller tabletop mills? I was thiniking one of them might work out for my needs.

No, the smallest one is a standard Bridgeport with 2-axis. We have one of these here at the shop. The other shop I worked at was mainly really big
work, compared to what I am doing now. At least for the time being:cool:
We are adding on a new shop building and have already bought a fair size
horizontal, waiting to get set in one section of that shop.

Just a thought
 

[Great forum, Thanks. Have you considered a forum for old cars. Model T's have a couple of good forums but many other oldies have no place to gather. Also magnetos from old cars. I guess it would be a subtopic of the old cars. Maybe include hit and miss and steam!]

I am filling with ten words to finish off this input.

Sorry, but I'm not sure if I understand how to post a new message-- I hope I'm doing this right.

I have two very old Craftsman metal lathes, model # 110.07403, the same model Quarterbore says he has. I have all essentials except the tool post, tool holders and cutters. We tried making a tool post by cutting down another larger tool post, and it worked for a few days before it snapped apart with a PING. (No, no one got hurt. Just one side of the post broke.) Does anyone know where I can find them? I've been watching eBay for a while, and have picked up other things I can use once it's working, but without a tool post holder that is narrow enough to fit in the groove of the cross slide, It's all useless. One possible solution is to fabricate a replacement for the top slide or the top of the carriage so that I can use larger, more robust tooling pieces, but at least for now I just want a tool post... the vertical part with the slot for holding cutting tools.

Both lathes are also missing the left rear covers over the motor pulley, and a few of the handles are broken, but are still useable.

Thanks!

Calartiste