Mini Lathe 3HP Motor Upgrade..... (Yep 3HP)

foreign holy smokes this thing is heavy okay so hear me out have you ever wondered what would happen if you shoved I don't know say three horsepower motor on the back of a mini lathe well one to know more because I've just gone out and bought a three horsepower motor and I know I've done a lot in the past with regards to making it a bit more rigid but I give this a 50 50 chance of the headstock just snapping off for context three horsepower is six times the power that the lathe came with now the topic of how I actually powered this lathe is saying that's come up a lot in the past from the factory it comes with a 350 watt DC motor and that's connected through a gearbox to the spindle and really 350 watts is not all that powerful now the only reason why I ended up replacing that motor was because the DC motorboard blue and for whatever reason the price to replace those boards was almost 300 bucks that's almost half the cost of a brand new Mini lathe so instead of replacing it I simply pulled apart my drill press and connected the AC motor to my lathe direct drive to the spindle using a pulley it also added the added benefit of just being more powerful than the old motor now that worked until the end of last year when that motor burns out and I simply replaced it with another dual press motor which is what I currently have here bolted to the back of the lathe for whatever reason it just ended up being a lot cheaper to buy a whole drill press rip the motor off and then attach that motor then it was to Simply go out and buy a motor by itself now in general I do like this setup simply because it was a simple fix these motors are quite simple and these single phase AC Motors are quite powerful the big downside to using these motors is the fact that they're thick speed the motor spins at 1400 RPM and there's not a huge amount that I could do about that I could vary the RPM slightly by moving around the belt to step it up and step it down but the lower speed I could get on the lathe was about six or seven hundred RPM I could never really cut anything at a reasonable speed and I ended up burning up a lot of tooling because I was just spitting the lathe way too fast in fact that's the main reason why I tend to use carbide tooling it's a lot more difficult to burn it up compared to high speed steel and it just seemed to work a lot better with this setup and that brings us back to the three horsepower motor not only is it three horsepower but it's also made to work with three-phase AC power that means we should be able to use a vfg to control the speed plus since I don't have three-phase power in this Workshop I was going to use a vfd anyway to convert the single phase to three phase so it's a win-win overall [Applause] thank you [Music] tell you what this motor is a lot bigger than I was expecting I also cannot stress enough just how crazy this upgrade is most big blades that I've used only have about one and a half to two horsepower and in fact this is probably going to be the most powerful lathe that I've ever used in fact just looking online these big ten thousand dollar lathes only come with two horsepower although In fairness those layers are geared this one won't be and if you're wondering why I chose to go with three horsepower compared to two well it was the same price as a two horsepower and three is bigger than two well that looks to be our connection terminal for our three-phase power okay so before I bolt the motor on there's a few things that I want to do to make sure I don't break the lathe so the first thing I want to do is just Bob the lathe down to something a bit more rigid I've gone ahead and bought a piece of 20mm thick plate which should do the job I'll cut it down to size and then drill holes for the mounting bolts [Music] [Music] I'll also need a hole for that bolt that holds that piece of steel bar that I put underneath the headstock I then bolt it back down and I'll reuse the old mounting plates on the bottom side [Music] and that feels a lot better I'm sure it will make a huge difference the next thing I need to do is machine a set of pulleys for the new Drive belts I'm still using V belts but these ones will be bigger than the old ones I know there's other styles of belts that I could have used but I prefer to use these belts for several reasons one they're easy to buy and they're easy to make the pulleys for but as well as that if I happen to crash the lathe which I know I am going to do at some point I'm relying on the belts to slip which is a better option than something else breaking I'll set up the lights and machine them using the old compound now I have to machine a Groove but The Parting tool that I have is a little bit too long for the job thankfully I have this piece of braised carbide which should work I haven't used sprays carbide in years and the lathe isn't really suited to using brace carbide but this piece should work with that said though I am having a bit of trouble the RPM is a little bit too fast and the carb wire just isn't all that well ground and I don't have any grinding will suit it for carbide thank you foreign [Music] with the first pulley now password I can clean it up and then get started Machining on a key while you [Music] I was going to use the carriage to act as a shaper and cut the keyway that way I've done it several times in the past before with gears and it does seem to work just fine but with this size keyway it was taking too long so instead I did it the old-fashioned way by hand using a file and I gotta say that is a pretty good fit I also machined up the other pulley to fit on the spindle there really wasn't much material to hold on to so I had to hold on to it using an arbor and some super glue [Music] and once the Machining was done I can then break the bond with some propane foreign the belt and then Mark out the position of the motor I then cut off a piece of Steel for the motor to bolt onto I bought the motor to the steel and then I'll line it up as you can probably tell these two pieces will be welded together and they will form a single piece that the motor and lathe will bolt onto it just seemed like the most straightforward and simple way of doing it and hopefully this will keep everything all aligned correctly and rigid or tack everything in with the stick welder and then I'll weld everything up [Music] [Music] foreign I'm pretty happy with that now before I do bolt it back on there is one small thing that I want to do first the headstock is held to the bed by three cap head screws you would have thought that they would have used four but for whatever reason they didn't so what I'll quickly do is add a fourth cap head screw myself foreign not sure how much of a difference this will make but we'll wait and see the final thing I want to do is make a cap to retain the pulley on the spindle for whatever reason I forgot to do this earlier and since I don't want to pull the new motor off the lathe at the moment what I'll do is I'll use the mill to make it instead [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thing left to do is get it all wired up so what I have here is a 2.2 kilowatt vfd the vfd will do two things firstly it will transform the single phase AC power that I have coming into the workshop into three-phase power that the motor can run on it will also change the frequency of the electricity that is going into the motor the motor RPM is proportional to the frequency of the power that is supplied so lowering the frequency will lower the RPM now I've never used a vfd but thankfully the instructions are pretty straightforward just make sure that you're careful because it does involve wiring up 240 volt power the first thing I'll do is wire up a connection to the wall I'll then wire up the connection to the motor and finally after a bit of mucking around and setting up the vfd we thankfully have power [Music] I'm very happy to see the lathe spinning and it's also really nice to be able to finally change the RPM of the spindle I haven't been able to do that in quite a few years nothing else left to do but see how this lathe can do so I've chucked in a piece of mild steel and I've set it up with a brand new insert so let's try one millimeter one millimeter seem to be pretty easy which isn't much of a surprise because I could do one millimeter with the old motor let's try to okay so two was definitely putting a bit of strain on the Chuck I might need to change out these speeds and feeds to machine it a little bit better but I definitely think it's got a lot more to give [Music] okay so because I can now slow it down I can now use reamers on the lathe thank you okay so far that's definitely an improvement and I'm really impressed there are definitely a few things that I need to do first before I can do any heavy Machining on it the Gibbs in the retentioning plate need to be adjusted so what I'll do is I'll tear it apart readjust it and hopefully that should make it a lot more rigid I'll do that behind the scenes and hopefully next week we can push this lathe to the Limit and that's about it for now I hope you enjoyed this video thank you very much for watching see you next week

Channel: Artisan Makes

Views: 176,902

Keywords: mini lathe, mini lathe upgrade, lathe, lathe upgrade, VFD, mini lathe motor, mini lathe motor upgrade, 3HP lathe, mini lathe big motor, mini lathe heavy machining, machining, sieg c3, 7 x 14 lathe, mini lathe 3 hp motor, mini lathe 2 hp motor, mini lathe 1 kw motor, big motor for mini lathe, mini lathe machining, 3 phase motor, mini lathe 3 phase motor, 3 phase motor VFD, carbide, lathe carbide, welding

Id: cm4OoQRWRW8

Length: 18min 40sec (1120 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 29 2023