Good 'Hobby Quality' Metal Lathes

[tmj]

I want a lathe. There are lots of them out there. Some are good, some are bad... and prices are all over the place. I'm not interested in a wood lathe as I already have one of those. I also don't need a $3,000 dollar metal lathe. I'd never get my money's worth out of something like that! Have any of you guys bought any of those cheaper table-top 'Amazon' lathes, Proxxon, etc.? I'd like to know what your firsthand experiences have been with your machines. Please, don't respond with "I've seen," "I've heard," etc. I've seen and 'heard' too! I want to hear facts from people who actually own and use these machines.

[LoydB]

I love my Sherline. 

[tmj]

2 minutes ago, LoydB said:

I love my Sherline.

What do you 'love' about it? Elaborate, please!

[Y.T.]

I own Sherline lathe and Sherline mill.  I also own Unimat lathe. This is all I will ever need for modeling. What is good about them? They are good.

[palmerit]

I asked something similar a while back - don’t know if there’s anything here that’s useful: 

I did not end getting a lathe or a mill. Maybe someday. 

[ChrisLBren]

Have a look at TAIG lathes as well.  I do not own one but am very happy with their mill and will be purchasing one in the near future.

[Toolmaker]

Capacity and power?

What size workpiece do you want to machine. What material do you want to machine and how much metal do you want to remove in a cut. Not withstanding, how much space can I dedicate to the machine and how much machine running noise is acceptable.

If it’s true model making you want and it has the capacity (workpiece size) you need, then Sherline is a great piece of kit for the money. Sherline is way ahead of Proxxon and is excellent in all ways straight out of the box. It was my choice and they have to be imported to the UK making them considerably more expensive than you can get them for in the States. Take a look and see how well developed their whole system is.

My decision was also aligned to me wanting to use my modelling machines in the house rather than a “workshop”.

Hope that helps a little

Paul

 

Edited 18 hours ago by Toolmaker

[kurtvd19]

I have owned both a Taig and a Sherline lathe.  Both are excellent machines.  The Taig will do all you want - the only reason I got the Sherline though was because the price was just about free - couldn't turn it down, but I can't do anything with the Sherline I can't do with the Taig.  I am not a machinist and only a machinist can use a Sherline to it's full capacity.

Kurt

[CPDDET]

Sherline was my choice because of quality build, customer support and full range of accessories. 

[sheepsail]

I also have both Taig and a Sherline lathes with many attachments which I use interchangeably.  At the moment these are boxed up.

 

My main lathe though is a Präzi from East Germany.  These were dumped in the US in the 1980s, and 1990s.  When they were replaced by the Swiss lathes. 

 

The lathe is not so much about the lathe itself.  It is about the attachments and tooling.  The collets and such what hold the work.  Some of the best come from Cowels in England which make some excellent stuff.

 

My other hobby is watchmaking so I have a few of warchmaker lathes as well.    I had a friend who had a Sears Atlas lathe which I loved.   Ironically to best make the tiny watch parts a big tool and die lathe is something I dream about.   With a big lathe one can make the fixtures for the small lathe.

 

As I get deeper into model ship building I am looking forward to seeing if I can use this equipment to turn toothpicks into the tiny fixtures the model so demands.

 

Woodworking and watchmaking prior to World War 1 in the 1920s was done with hand held tools.  (there were stories of master watchmakers making lathes from three large horseshoe nails.)  So it becomes about sharpening the gravers.

 

The critical thing about a lathe is a parameter called run out.  the other is swing.   Runout is how round you can make the part and is determined by the bearings. Air bearings are the best. Babbit works surprisingly well.  Babbit is tin lead solder so it is liquid when the bearings are spinning and creating heat.  So a cheap lathe or dremel will have cheap bearings.  So one side will be out of round where the tool catches. 

 

Swing is the largest item that can be turned without banging into things.

 

Lead screws are what allow items to be replicated.  Such were done with patterns.  This was industrialized in the 18th century. (1700s)   Milling is also considered lathe work.   This is also when the punch cards came about then the paper tapes, which could create the rivets and such. Cams could move the tooling and such in amazingly complex patterns.  Someone realized that everything could be created with an infinite number of sin and cosine waves.   These were called "imaginary" numbers.     

 

Alan Turing used this abstraction  to make a machine which could move a string (finite infinity) back and forth and make marks on it.  Then use the marks to move the string.   Such is what a machinist does when turning the handles of a lathe (2D) or a mill (3D)  Good machinist are great at arithmetic, pretty much human computers (what the word originally meant.)   They can feel all of this intuitively.  (the cards (digital) /cams(analog) record what they do for playback.) 

 

What a lot of people do not know about a guy named Babbage in the 1830s and designed the first computer.  First he had to make (or invent) a lathe to make it.   Leonardo da Vinchi had documented the lathes used by the Greeks and Romans (and Egyptians) and made the Antikythera device.   According to Archimedes a screw is an inclined plane or triangle.  (which is what a sine wave looks like when graphed)   So Babbage had to find the perfect screw. (rimshot)   His mechanics Clement and Withworth fought over who actually invented the machine 19th century lathe.   Whitworth got the credit.   And screws are all now standard shaped.  In reality all three invented the modern lathe.  Ego can sometimes set thing back a generation or more. 

 

As a child I met Frank Oppenheimer.  (yes him.)  Who was working on a lathe behind a wooden partition I could hardly look over at the ExplOritiorum.  He told me a lathe was a special tool since It could make a copy of itself.  In other words It could make anything.  Such statements like that keep me up at night.

 

Ironically AI, uses this same statistical math.  To make copies of ideas.  Like a panto-graph, which lathes and milling machines use to make things larger and smaller.  This device shows that everything is an infinite sum of waves around a circle. I guess what the Theosophist call vibrations.  This is called a space time transform.  Often called a Fourier transform after some 18th century dude who was good with lathes and estimating things like the population of France was after they cut the head off the leaders.   He and his friends also measured exactly how large the coastline of France was.  Ben Franklin was doing similar things in America with Kites and governments.  (did you know Franklin invented the spark plug?  Fun at parties, Volta used it to light farts on fire. Which is why electricity is measured in volts.  Steam engines and internal combustion engines are also abstractly lathes.)

 

In the 1960s and 1970s this math was done with a computer. Some guys named like Cooly and Turky made Fourier transforms fast.   GPUs use matrix math billions of times a second to display images.  Now abstract ideas.  Even more so that there is some weird thing called spin, what creates magnetism or polarization in light.   So I think Mr Oppenheimer was right.  That the universe is some sort of quantum lathe.

 

Not sure how to fit one other useless abstract bit of info into this digression.  A way of visualizing Fourier's singularity. Which is a pixel.  In space a pixel looks like a square or cube.  In time it looks like a Mexican hat with  wide brim or probably a better image ripples on the surface of a pond.   These things also have sound.  (and color) what we call frequency.   This is also what happens at the center of a lens where all the light ray meet.  One can make a lens with a lathe.  So we come about here in a full circle.  AI is simply simulating what is happening at the center of a lens.  (and we know what happens when one uses magnifying glass and the sun. Pirates only have one eye as they had to learn how to properly use a sextant or spyglass.  Do not look at sun with remaining eye.)  

 

None of which answers what brand lathe is best.  Personally I'd give emphasis on anything Swiss, since that is what the other countries aspire to. 

 

(no AI was used in the creation if this ramble.  -- otherwise it would make sense.) 

 

-julie

 

[tmj]

Very impressive, and 'also' quite informative, Julie! Something tells me that you also probably know what E=mc² 'truly' represents! 😏

[druxey]

Well, there have been many good points raised. The most pertinent being what is the range of items you want to make on this hypothetical lathe? If it's only occasional small parts of medium precision, an old original Unimat will so the trick nicely. Mine is from the early '70's before they went to plastic parts. High precision small parts? A well-kept used watchmakers' lathe. A Boley or Levin are good - I've used both. However, items like collets can run up the cost quickly. Serious model engineering? Sherline.

 

Julie: those 19th century inventors and engineers are a fascinating study in themselves. Brunel Senior's block-making machines, for a start.

[tmj]

4 minutes ago, druxey said:

Well, there have been many good points raised. The most pertinent being what is the range of items you want to make on this hypothetical lathe? If it's only occasional small parts of medium precision, an old original Unimat will so the trick nicely. Mine is from the early '70's before they went to plastic parts.

Well said David! Small, occasional parts of medium precision will be my only use of such a lathe. I have large, accurate lathes at work, but they are no fun. I want a lathe to make small, not extremely precise parts while watching TV and relaxing at home with my 'unprecise' hobbies. Brass or steel cannons, wooden stanchions, aluminum doodads, etc. Fancy, 'yes'... 'precise', not so much! 🙂