Harbor Freight 7x10 Mini Lathe Review 93212

[Music] hey what's up welders welcome to another episode of adventures in welding today something a little bit different if you're not in the machining at all feel free to skip over this video you're not gonna hurt my feelings but if you are stick around and maybe you'll find something you like for everybody else this is going to be a review of the central machinery 7 by 10 inch precision mini lathe from Harbor Freight now this thing weighs almost 90 pounds and it comes in a cardboard box with a wooden top and bottom steel banded around that it's shipped very well and I got it with no damage so what do you get you get the lathe ok headstock tail stock bed carriage pan safety guard couple wrenches whole set of allen keys why don't you have the two here that you're gonna use most of all and one of these four-way turret type tool holders no tooling you do however get a live Center for the tailstock all right all right we're going to start off here at the headstock the head of the lathe of the controls this is a hundred and ten volt lathe a hundred ten volt motor so it comes with the standard US three prong plug now the controls are all right here we have your forward and reverse switch and in the middle it where it is now is nothing forward is to you that mean it is going to be rotating in this direction reverses away to be rotating in that direction the main power switch with a little LED indicator and your speed control which is also switch operated those are the controls on the front of the lathe okay on the rear of the lathe here you have your high and low gear control and you have your lead screw Direction neutral reverse and forward you have to pull that out so that it goes into a detent this will swing easily but you tend to have to rotate the gears a little bit to get it to engage okay all right back to the front of the lathe and your controls so to turn on the lathe and get it spinning this safety cover has to be in the down position there's a little switch right here and if that is up the leg will not operate so you pick your direction power on two little LEDs lit up make sure this is down and we are in the low gear mode here you can see this which will give us a maximum speed of 1,100 rpm so to power it up all we have to do now is turn the knob and the lathe is operating that's about 550 rpm there's 1,100 rpm and you see how that goes that goes up it automatically stops and if it comes down it does not restart you have to turn this switch off and then re-engage all right from the headstock we will now move to the tailstock which sits here on the rear end of the lathe the tails lock stock slides on the bed of the lathe and unfortunately the only way to lock it is to get in here with a wrench I know that doesn't seem like a big problem but it can interfere with the carriage and a lot of other things that makes it a pain online a place called little machine shop sells a cam lock adapter I think it's about thirty dollars for this I'll be adding that to the lathe real soon and what it does is simply adds a lever back here so that you can do it like that now the tailstock right now I have the dead center in it and it has about two inches of travel graduated scale on there and this handle here locks the tailstock into position now the tailstock has a number two Morse taper so let's retract now watch this little sleeve right here it retracts into the tailstock and releases whatever tool you have that is the number two Morse taper and that is a live Center now sadly they did not include a drill chuck with the lathe which limits about half of the things you can do with the lathe but I ordered this one from Amazon for about $30 and it engages in just the same way like that so you can do your drilling operations and we'll cover that a little further on in this review we're looking end on at the tail end of the lathe and I removed the tail stock it just slides on right here you fit that little T nut into this groove and it goes on but as it comes from the factory you will need to loosen this screw right here in order to remove the tail stock all right now let's talk about the carriage and the carriage controls this large black knob on the bottom is your longitudinal feed that moves the carriage towards and away from the headstock this small silver handle here with the graduated dial is your cross feed and that moves your compound and tool holder longitudinally in and out and this small silver dial back here is your compound adjustment and that moves the compound in the x-axis along whatever angle you have it now here is a real pain in the ass with this particular lathe in order to adjust the angle of the compound which you're not going to do a lot but if you cut tapers you're going to have to do it the compound needs to be almost completely unscrewed to reveal these two allen head screws here and here once there loosen the compound can be rotated to the desired angle and there is a nice protractor right there now for probably the majority of your lathe operations that's not really going to be a necessity but it does become a necessity sometimes and it can be a bit of a pain in the butt now we're going to talk about the tool post I'm going to remove this cap here so that I can remove the tool post and show it to you you can mount four different tools in here from quarter inch to 3/8 inch the tool posts slides on here and is locked in place like this now it does have the tents that allows it to be pretty much locked in either of these positions but that detent is spring-loaded so you can put the compound in any position that you want for your turning all right as I said in the beginning the lathe doesn't come with any tooling so you're gonna have to purchase your own tooling it can use quarter inch 5/16 all the way up to 3/8 tooling now if you're unfamiliar with the different types of tooling a quick primer here there's a 60 degree tool for cutting threads you can also use for turning and facing there is a right-hand cutting tool I have a left hand cutting tool on the tool post this is for cutting internal threads this is a carbide insert in the tool holder this is another 60-degree tool with a carbide cutting surface braised on to it this is a parting tool for cutting things off like I said any type of tool that you can want to use you can use on here alright let's talk about some materials alright before we get into materials there's one thing I forgot to mention and that is this lathe does have a power feed on the longitudinal axis to engage it you flick this handle down [Music] and you can see it attorney it will move to for small to the speed away [Music] to stop it you lift that handle up and there are change gears in the head of the lathe to change your different gearing for your different threading operations but if all you're going to be doing is turning it's not really going to be a problem you can leave it as it comes it does come with the change gears all right different materials that you can use it with this lathe this is Delrin plastic aluminum steel the lathe can cut just about any type of material that you're going to use in your hobby machine shop operations and you are just going to have to adjust your depth of cut for each different material for instance this Delrin plastic you can take a much bigger bite than you can with the steel pipe alright what I'm doing here is what's called facing this is where you flatten the end of your workpiece so that it is perpendicular to the length of it and you do that by cutting across the face this is the Delrin I'm spinning here you can take a pretty good cut probably up to 25 30 thousandths with it I'm just cutting about ten thousands nothing nothing too big I'm just playing around getting a feel for the lathe you can see I'm using a left-handed tool and you're cutting with just the tip all right after facing your work the next step is usually Center drilling it we're using a combination center drill countersink here it's in the chuck which is in the tool post and this will drill a perfectly centered conical shaped hole into the material after this you can drill a deeper you can use a center but this is generally the next step okay in this operation we are going to turn the work to a diameter that means we are going to reduce it to a set diameter we're starting out here with two inches and seventy-five thousand machine the work is chucked in the machine the dead center is there to hold everything steady we have our 60 degree cutter in and we are going to apply it to the work now the first step is to set your zero point we turn the lathe on and then we bring the cross slide in until we just touch the work you'll see a line up here that's called touching off and that is how we know we are at zero now I'm going to engage the lead screw into the forward direction and we'll use the power feed to make a nice smooth turning operation turn the lathe on about 300 RPM then we're going to dial in ten thousandths of an inch for this cut and engage the power feed the machine does all the work all we have to do is disengage the power feed when we're done with the cut and then we bring the carriage back and we repeat this process until we've reached the diameter we're looking for alright so overall impressions before we get to that the laser also comes with two sets of Jaws I have the external jaws on there it comes with internal jaws already set up the internal jaws are good for gripping things up to about an inch and a half beyond that you're going to want to put on the external jaws and now this 7 by 10 inch lathe means you are theoretically able to swing an object seven inches in diameter by 10 inches but in theory and in practice you're gonna find out that you're gonna have trouble with anything that's really that big for instance this is a piece of three-inch black iron pipe black is really just steel I have to switch to the internal jaws to mount it up there but if you take a look at that and bring the cross slide all the way out here [Music] I'm gonna bring the cloth cross slide out to its maximum depth and you can see at that 90 degree tool angle it's not going to make it now yeah we can adjust the tool holder to give ourselves a different angle and would be just fine but I would say three and a half to four inches is the maximum diameter of an object you're going to be able to turn on here the hand wheels as with any lathe have some manner of backlash see that right there when changing directions you're going to have a little bit of dead space and that's a necessity in the design of the mechanical lead screws on here there's nothing you can do about it you're just going to have to account for it your compound and your cross slide have precision dials each tick mark as it says here is one thousandth of an inch or 25 millimeters so when you go from zero 10,000 20,000 30,000 s one revolution is 40 thousandths of an inch now that's the same for both cross slides final impressions for the price this was listed at $549,000 for around four hundred and eighty dollars for the price this is an excellent small lathe it did come with a chip guard on the back I took it off because I do a lot of a hat song pieces off and it was getting in the way there is a thread chasing dial for threading the bed is nicely machine it is relatively sturdy now you see there is a slight bit of movement here on my compound the cross slide and carriage are locked in very nice expect to pay another thirty to fifty dollars for a drill chuck and at least thirty more dollars for your tooling I would give this lathe three and three-quarter out of five stars for what you're paying for is it's an excellent little lathe like I said you have some slop here and there you can adjust the Gib strips to work that out the tailstock not having a cam lock I mean what's the difference in price maybe twenty-five cents but they cheap out so if you want a cam lock you're gonna have to buy one separately it's a hundred ten volts it's ninety pounds it is two feet long by one foot deep by about fourteen inches high this is an excellent safety feature there's another guard that goes here but that drives me nuts what I recommend it to a friend absolutely get yourself a paint brush keep your lathe clean it comes covered in grease you're going to want to wipe that all off before you begin any operations there's going to be a lot of chatter when you're doing any plunge cutting that's just the way the lathe is made and there's not too much you can do about it but that's it thanks for watching have a great day now get on out you [Music]

Channel: Adventures in Welding!

Views: 1,056,911

Rating: 4.7508759 out of 5

Keywords: mini lathe, review, harbor freight, 93212, Harbor Feight Mini Lathe 93212, Lathe (Invention), Harbor Freight Tools (Business Operation), Reviews

Id: YHf_4ukttjo

Length: 21min 27sec (1287 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 06 2015