Thread: Metal lathes

Wow, that will sure beat any mini lathe. I really like mine but it does have it's limits.

I have a small 8" South Bend belt drive lathe from the 1960s or 1970s I got at an auction from a tech school it was three phase but I swapped the motor out to single phase. Paid about $600.00 for the lathe. It hadn't been used real hard, the ways are in good shape and it doesn't have a huge amount of lash. The main disadvantage is that to move it you need a tractor or forklift.

As someone told me at the time the tooling is the expensive part and they were right! I've been buying tooling as needed. It can cut threads and do just about anything I need. I've also spent some time running the gear drive lathes where you don't have to mess with belts to change speed. They are nice but the used ones tend to be more pricey but might be coming down as everyone continues to switch to CNC.

Three jaw chucks are easiest to use but not as precise as the four jaw ones. For what I'm doing I usually use my three jaw.

Hope that helps!

Yes 3 jaw chucks are easy but with a 4 jaw you have a lot more that you can do. Joel (Benz here at SRP was a 3rd generation machinist and he turned me onto this guy's channel). He really blows me away.

If you skip in to 4:25 minutes you'll see him started to chuck the project up and then indicate it for machining.

Thanks for sharing, that is amazing and really hard to do!

My dad was a machinist but no where near Adam's level. I wish dad was still alive so we could watch the videos together, I think he'd really enjoy them.

Here's another project that took a lot of figuring to be able to to mount the project securely in the machine which this time is a shaper.



I've posted before about how I worked after school for an old machinist when I was 14 years old. He had a huge lathe that had a 36 inch swing. I saw him use it once and it scared the hell out of me. He used it to turn the pivots on a bulldozer's hydraulic rams down so we could install bushings made on one of the smaller lathes.

I can still him standing calmly on the platform while a cylinder was swinging.