7 Mods and Improvements for a Metal Lathe

[Music] hey welcome back i'm going to try something a bit different with this video this is mostly the type of stuff i do in the shop that i don't usually make videos about because i think it's probably pretty niche content and not that interesting to most viewers but i'm just going to give it a try this is basically a collection of all the small and large improvements and modifications that i've done to my life and just a bit of general math and shop talk since i get this question all the time this late model is a zeke or a sikh sc10 and as you probably guessed that's a chinese manufacturer i'm not going to get into the whole topic of buying a new chinese machine compared to buying a used industrial machine because it's just a huge can of worms and everybody has their own opinion but i'll just say i don't regret buying this thing and i think these types of machines are usually a good deal as long as you have the right expectations the slate has done everything i asked of it so far it has decent power it's accurate and has the features that i wanted but especially with these import machines there's always some room for improvement so let's take a look at some of the changes that i've made one of my first changes was to get rid of this control panel i didn't like the fact that it's made of plastic and it had these touch type buttons which are kind of hard to tell apart when you're not looking at them so i switched that for an aluminum plate and installed some proper switches there's one more early mod that i didn't film and that is a modified hand wheel for the carriage in its original state the gear ratio between the hand wheel and the carriage was just way too high for my taste meaning you could move the carriage pretty fast but it was hard to position it with any kind of accuracy because even a small movement on the wheel would translate into a relatively big movement on the carriage so my solution was to build this little gearbox which achieves a one to four gear reduction so now i have to do four rotations to travel the same distance and that makes it much easier to position it in small increments the next mod is something i'm actually going to revisit in this video quite some time ago i improvised this digital readout for the tailstock using one of those cheapo digital calipers and it did work out okay overall and also turned out to be pretty useful but i was never happy with this particular implementation because it's not very elegant and it also has a tendency to collide with the tool post to do it properly this time i bought this dro kit on ebay and this is basically the same thing as the caliper except this is actually supposed to be installed on the machine and comes with a separate display to install this i need to drill some more holes into the tailstock and since i hate using handheld drills for this type of stuff the whole thing is going on the mill then i just made this simple mounting plate and the next step is to install this and also make a counterpart that attaches to the quill this piece will connect the quill to the moving part of the scale and at one point while i was making this i thought i had messed up the part and had to scrap it but then i was able to salvage it so anyway this is how it ended up looking [Applause] now the display can be attached wherever i want using magnets and overall i think this is a much cleaner solution now and most importantly doesn't interfere with anything next up is some tool storage i used to keep the tool holders under the table here but it's a bit inconvenient so i decided to whip up a quick tool shell from some scraps i had laying around [Music] often when i spontaneously build stuff like this it's shaped largely by what kind of materials i happen to have around the shop at the time so this might not end up being the best possible solution even though i built some things in an overly elaborate way i'm also often pretty pragmatic about other builds and just want stuff done quickly and good enough so that i can move on to something more interesting and this was definitely one of those cases the extra storage for the chuck keys here wasn't even something i planned on originally but it turned out to be very useful in addition to storing the tool holders and now all the most frequently used stuff as a home and it's easy to reach the next mod is a bit unnecessary and more of a personal satisfaction build i've always been bothered by the fact that the headstock has these plastic covers on top functionally there's nothing wrong with these but something about plastic parts on a lathe just feels wrong to me so i decided to switch these for steel plates i think these are something like 10 millimeters thick so pretty beefy for that purpose and now you can actually drop some heavy work pieces on here without a second thought i chose to just leave the mill scale on the plates because i think it's actually kind of cool looking in this case and this stuff is super hard it doesn't rust and it's not a bad surface finish and a nice side effect is that magnetic tool holders can now also be used here now it's time for the biggest modification so far and to explain it i'm just going to show you what used to happen when i tried to do parting or cut off operations on the slate just in case you've never used delay this is not how you want it to sound like okay so maybe that was just a crappy parting tool so let's try another one which has never been in use so it should cut okay [Music] and there we go again you can actually see how everything on the lathe is starting to shake and vibrate alright so maybe the tool holder was the problem so here we got another tool holder which is specifically meant to hold parting tools and also a brand new parting blade which has also been freshly sharpened seems to work a bit better in the beginning but nope [Music] this is unfortunately a pretty common problem on this type of lathe or smaller lathes in general the problem here is the overall rigidity which really becomes an issue with parting since it's a pretty brutal operation for any lathe and it can really highlight those issues the problem isn't really with the lathe itself but with its weakest link which is very often the top slide the top slide gives you an additional degree of movement on a lathe which is most often used for cutting tapers apart from being the flimsiest thing between the actual tool and the carriage this is also usually the part with the lowest build quality on these import lathes and with tolerances not being that great that means even when you lock it down there's just too many ways this can still slightly shake around which makes the whole setup less rigid and that creates vibrations and chatter and all the problems you just saw so one common solution for that is to simply ditch the entire top slide and replace it with a solid tool post that way you lose the ability to cut tapers but in exchange you get a much more rigid setup and you can always go back to the top slide if and when you actually need it so that's what i'm gonna build next i'm cutting these angles because i'm going for shape here that actually leans over the cross slide a bit which gives me a bit more clearance when i want to work on large diameter parts i think it would be best to make this from cast iron but i'm still a cheapskate and that stuff is expensive and hard to find so i'm once again using the cheapest possible metal i can get my hands on which is the hardware to mild steel not very fancy but a solid chunk of that should still do the job [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] uh all right so let's give this a try and see if anything changed i didn't expect much so i was shocked by how big the difference is having changed nothing about the setup except for that tool post i could instantly start putting off 40 millimeters of steel without any issues i even got a bit cocky here and instead of hand feeding in this shot i'm actually power feeding into the cut which is something i would not have dared to even try before and the late simply walks into this cut like it's nothing so just for kicks let's also try some aluminum i'm running this with the power feed again and unsurprisingly this also works perfectly and with that i can say i'm super happy with this modification and if you've ever had problems with chatter on your lathe i would definitely recommend you give this a try next up are some way covers i used to have this rubber flap attached here and while that did help a little bit there's still always a lot of mess on the waist so i'm gonna make some ugly but functional covers that will hopefully make the cleanup much easier and also reduce wear around the waist rubber is most likely not the best material for this but i happen to have this large roll of fairly thin rubber mat in the shop and i'll just use that for now and see if it works out the idea is to sandwich the rubber between the plate and these aluminum strips using rivets so and then this whole thing will just attach between the cross light and the tool post it would be better to do a cutout here so the tool post sits directly on the cross light but just like with the rubber i decided to just go with the simplest solution at first and see if i notice any problems and then i can always make things more complicated later thanks to these flaps being relatively thin and flexible they actually do a pretty good job of just kind of rolling themselves up and out of the way at the point of making this video i have already used this setup for a few weeks and they're actually less annoying than i would have expected i can honestly say it's pretty rare for these covers to really interfere with the work so while i'll be the first to admit that this isn't exactly a nice looking solution it was super easy to make it works great and i haven't had to clean chips off the waist even once since i installed the covers last mod for today will be a chip shield sometimes the layout likes to shoot a stream of chips straight in your face and even with safety glasses that gets old pretty fast and also creates a huge mess so for those moments you want something to deflect those chips to hopefully contain that a little bit i want to make a decently sized shield and for that i'm going to use some of this stuff that's a sheet of polycarbonate which is the same stuff they make riot shields out of because it's super tough and transparent at this point i want to take a quick break for a little update you might notice the shop looks a bit different in this shot and that's because during filming all this i actually moved out of the makeshift workshop that i've been working in for the past two years i'm not sure it really came across in the videos but i was working in this wooden shed thing here which was inside of an old shared industrial hall the nice thing is that it was cheap but everything there was very improvised i had a roof made of bubble wrap it was cold as hell in winter the flow was made of these pave stones from hell and plants were growing into my shop so needless to say i'm glad i finally found a place to set up a proper shop again which looks really sleek and clean and most importantly it has luxuries like heat and three-phase power and water and i'll hopefully stay there for a while and i plan to show you the new shop in some more detail when i finally do a shop tour but for now i'm just showing you this to explain why the videos look different since i have more space in the new shop i could finally fit a table saw in there again and that comes in handy because you can cut a lot of materials with these other than wood for example this stuff another cool thing about polycarbonate is that you can bend it so i'm ripping out my metal break here which seems to get heavier every time i do that i've never actually tried this before i think i read somewhere that you can even cold blend this but it's a pretty tough material and it turned out that even after heating it up quite a bit it didn't seem to soften up that much so eventually i just went for it and it did put up a bit of a fight but the bed turned out pretty nice this is what i used as a shield so far it's one of those useless things they put on drill presses to avoid lawsuits and that everyone removes right away and it's also way too small for this purpose but it already has this handy attachment piece so i'll just steal that and use it for my new shield and as always when i'm not sure how i want to mount something i just drill a bunch of useless holes so i can change my might later and here's that satisfying moment you've been waiting for unfortunately this thing is never going to look this clean again to make use of this i decided to just put it into one of these flexible magnetic tool arms which usually hold dial indicators it's not very heavy so this thing is strong enough to hold it securely in place thanks to the new tool post having all these large flat surfaces this can now be attached in a number of ways and then you can set it to a lot of different positions depending on what's needed and if i don't want it moving around with the carriage i can now also attach it to the headstock and have it sit over the chuck and what's also nice is i can also use this for the milling machine or pretty much any other machine because you can attach it to any magnetic surface that's all for today i have a feeling this won't be the last mods i've done to this thing and hopefully you could get some useful information out of this video i know i'm like the slowest youtuber ever when it comes to releasing new videos but i got some cool projects planned for this year and i don't want to promise too much but with the new sharp situation you can hopefully look forward to some more output from me and if you want to see what i'm up to in between videos you can always check out my instagram so until then thanks for watching and see you next time or not it's up to you

Channel: Phil Vandelay

Views: 200,956

Rating: 4.9564853 out of 5

Keywords: machining, metalwork, engineering, building, diy, milling machine, lathe, steel, welding, plans

Id: Y3N5k4rmf9o

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2021