The Infamous Mini Lathe!

okay I think it's safe I bought a variable-speed manila de and this video is gonna be long-winded if you're just looking to cut to the chase and I can respect that but if you're even asking or thinking about buying a leave like this the answer is yes just buy one these things can be a lot of fun however the rest of this video is about qualifying that answer I've always said any lave is better than no leaf but you should know what you're getting into so yes I bought a mini leaf now that it's really here I'm not exactly sure why this thing is cute though I have to give it that in a sort of the feral cat and my bushes just had kittens and I don't know what to do with them now kind of way I've always got a lot of questions about which lathe to get and these mini leads were always quite popular I mean in terms of lathes I get asked about display what it says on the about me page not a lathe genealogist but I get it and in this case I literally got it I really only just broke the box down I wouldn't quite call it a crate but the wave did show up in one piece more or less and it does run I powered it on once going by the smell when I opened the box it was a 50/50 shot of it actually working this is my way of taking one for the team not necessarily a derogatory behind the dumpster in an alley sort of way I already have a leave and am in no immediate need of another one my impulse is to say something snarky like this isn't really a leave that it's just one more clever ruse to separate you from your money well it is true I'm gonna try to be fair and full disclosure I do have one or two skeletons in my closet this is the lathe I started out with me not this one exactly but the same bloodline I've mentioned this before more than a few times but despite all the toys you see on this channel this is purely a hobby for me and we all start somewhere as you get better or more familiar rather with what you like what you'd like to do and how you'd like to do it well you start to slowly climb that ladder one rung at a time towards that shop or tool or whatever you've always wanted sometimes that ladder breaks and when it does they take all those broken pieces and make a leave like this okay I'm sorry it's stronger than me the potshots are just too easy when I started with one of these I had a lot of fun and believe it or not even made useful parts but we'll get into that shortly the very first thing you should do if you get one of these is to bolt it down to something solid I'd recommend pouring a giant concrete block with anchor sticking at the top but a heavy bench should do you do get a bag of stuff when you get one of these but they don't include any rigidity with the lathe if your lathe wobbles when you try to turn the knobs or just generally look in its direction stop what you're doing and bolt it down to something solid take it apart maybe a little more carefully than that if you looked up world of difference and there was a picture to go with that this would be it it's already starting to feel like a different lathe at this point the leaves should be leveled or have the twist removed rather it maybe do that by shimming under the anchor points with some washers perhaps I have a video on lathe leveling if you're interested I'm not going to bother to do that here that's its own entire topic and this isn't the lathe final resting place anyway I'm not shooting for precision at this point I just want to see what this thing can do you shouldn't spin up a lathe with nothing in the chuck or with no tension on the jaws I don't know if that's an old wives tale but I wouldn't do it unless you really trusted your chuck I'm not standing in front of this by the way I won't lie that was a little bit frightning that's 2,500 rpm according to the dial that's twice as fast as my big lathe can spin you know well let's measure that so the published speed is 50 to 2500 rpm start out on the lowest setting getting about 80 there let's try 2500 about twenty one twenty two hundred and it's not getting any less skill this is the seven by fourteen mini leaf straight from the golden shores of China I didn't expect to be showing you this until the new year but this thing moves pretty fast got it in three weeks maybe a month faster than I expected at any rate anyway seven by fourteen indicates the maximum capacity of the lathe in this case seven inch diameter by fourteen inch long between centers between centers means no Chuck you have to use lathe centers to get that capacity just to clarify that's the maximum size of something that would physically fit in this machine but of course you wouldn't load a seven inch diameter by fourteen inch long piece of steel on this which would weigh about a hundred and fifty pounds by the way you can get smaller versions there's a seven by twelve and a very popular seven by ten I could have sworn there used to be seven by 16 inch lathes and that's really what I was looking for but it appears they're all eight inch lathes now maybe I was dreaming that number the reason you want more bed length isn't because you'd necessarily want to be working on something that long but once you get a Chuck on there and put some tooling in the tailstock you can run out of that space pretty darn fast this is the smaller drill chuck from my larger lathe I don't have a Morse to adapter to put in this tailstock but a comparable Chuck would be about this size maybe a smidge smaller and this is a quarter inch drill just for scale about six millimeters hopefully you can make out with just the drill chuck and the lathe Chuck I'm really only left with I don't know six inches 150 millimeters maybe a little bit more and this is the seven by fourteen leave you had the seven by ten you'd be missing four more inches there now some machines you can mitigate that by putting the material down into the truck through the spindle bore for example this is longer than I could hold on the capacity to sleeve but I can kind of stick it down the bore clamp it there and work on it close to the Chuck the limitation on a smaller machine like this is that spindle bore isn't very big here it's about 20 millimeters 3/4 of an inch so if you do work smaller than that you can push it down into the spindle and work on just the ends if it's larger than that you have to work across the bed I went with this one because it was the absolute cheapest one I could find these all come from China the other versions and colors you see these lathe just relabeled rebranded maybe some quality control gets done by third parties before you see it maybe you get some additional accessories but they're all from probably the same place in China and getting this right from the horse's mouth cost me about five hundred and fifty dollars shipping set me back about seventy for argument's sake let's say that's seven hundred bucks all in if you think that initial investment in lathe hurt well you ain't seen nothing yet with time what you spent on your lathe will pale in comparison to the tooling that you'll accumulate case in point after ordering the lathe I decided to get a quick change tool post and isn't that just the cutest thing you've ever seen and I got some insert tooling now the tool posts on the machine is fine it'll do its job just fine actually let's go look at it here's the tool post cute little tool posts nothing wrong with it raise the screws put your lathe tool in there clamp them down now again these are fine you can have a blast with these but you'll soon run into the inconvenience of not being able to adjust your tool height once you weigh your tool in there and clamp it down however tall your tool is that's your tool height with the quick change tool posts you can move that entire tool up and down to coincide with the lathe centerline so you're cutting on center with this type of tool post if you have a tool that's a little too short you're gonna have to shim up underneath it if it's a little too big you'll have to get out the angle grinder and carefully drop the tool until you match the center height now even that frankly isn't that big of a deal as long as you only have four tools as soon as you have another one and you want to swap it in well now you got to start keeping track of which tools go with which shims I don't know it's not very convenient I think I could have bought the slightly smaller one I think it can make that work it's gonna require a bushing maybe a different bolt probably a bushing I don't know if this is gonna fit yep just barely and now I could drop in any tool I like adjust the height once for center line lock the tool in place and then whenever I remove that tool and put it back it'll always be back at the same height again it's purely convenience this thing with again four tool holders also import set me back a hundred and fifty dollars and the indexable tooling with a couple of boxes of inserts I think was another hundred so two hundred and fifty bucks which now puts me at half the price of the lathe on the back end it has a cam lock for the tailstock that's pretty nice I remember the lathe I had had a nut down at the bottom total pain in the butt it was never enough clearance for the wrench and you move this thing more often than you might think the lever just rotates an eccentric pin that puts tension on that bolt and walks the tailstock down to the bed out of the box that did need a little bit of adjustment but it's just a nut you tighten up a bit on the bottom in fact I might have tightened it too much the lead screw is a little more anemic than what I seem to remember but the threads do appear fully formed they are Acme threads but if they were a little bit bigger that might have been nicer the wave uses this screw for both thread cutting and power feet when you engage the half nut you're basically clamping onto that threaded rod and then as it spins it drags the carriage along this one has no thread dial that means you can't disengage it a half nut if you're cutting threads you'll have to reverse the lathe to move the cutting tool to the beginning and then reverse it again to make the next cut you the scale from the compound is just a looks like a chromed piece of plastic just bolt it to the front one thing I didn't remember and what I don't like is that to change this angle you have to retract the entire top slide to get access to a pair of screws that loosen that plate now you might be thinking what's the big deal I mean how often do you swing the top slide well if you could swing it to the exact angle that you need it and locked it down I mean I guess it's not that big of an inconvenience setting a top slide usually takes a lot of iterations to say you want to set it to 30 degrees you turn this lock it down and your best guess and then you'd have to start sweeping with an indicator to see how close you were then maybe loosen it bump it a bit tighten it back down sweep again having never tracked the entire compound or top slide every time yeah not super and if you can make it out but those Gibbs probably need a little bit of tightening so there probably wasn't that much get left when fully retracted I was also shocked to find that a low-cost import machine doesn't have power cross feed so if you do a lot of facing you'll be doing that by hand or make an adapter for your cordless drill I don't see any immediate way to lock the carriage usually there's a screw somewhere to lock it down in case you're taking some heavier facing cuts you don't want the load from cutting to slowly push or carriage back and you end up with a domed or conical face though something like that's probably not that hard to add drill a hole at a big flange nut on the bottom drivetrain for the leadscrew so the spindle is driven with a DC motor it's back here in the bottom via a timing belt the timing belt looks like it sneaks up behind this aluminum casting yet you could just see the belt back there so that's your spindle speed that motor speed is controlled by the knob on the top here and the rest of this junk does all the gearing to get the lead screw to turn at the right proportion at the right ratio to your spindle how fast that lead screw turns in relation to that spindle determines your feed rate or the thread pitch that you're cutting and likely the most contentious issue is that they're using plastic gears that's not necessarily the end of the world but we'll get to that in a second something I don't like is the placement of the tumbler here in the back of the machine when you throw this lever it introduces another gear and the gear train that reverses the direction of the lead screw so if you want a thread or a face away from the chalk you'd have to flip that lever maybe you're not flipping the direction of your lead screw very often but having a control on the back of the machine just seems awkward to me so here's what I got with my leaf there are some tools there's the Chuck key I was wondering why the one I was using didn't fit so great I was using the one for my fourth axis on the CNC router anyway tools the other set of jaws for the Chuck I'm not sure I guess these might be mounting feet for the lathe not sure what those extra screws are for you get a little nasal wash bottle that's nice of them it comes in handy if you turn a lot of brass or cast-iron and then the Chuck guard the shield that is attached to the microswitch on the Chuck and then the plastic gears these are change gears the manual and the cover have instructions little tables on which gears to use for which feeds or threads you're trying to move the saddle at that you want the lathe tool to move in relation to the rotations of the spindle so you look on the chart you find the gears that you need and then you'd install these in place of the plastic gears we saw in the lathe just a moment ago so these gears are maybe I don't know nylon that might not be a smart choice em 160 I can't read that Oh's e 60 60 teeth P om okay so these are ass little gears so that's better that's a little is good for gears metal would have been nicer now you can buy metal gears for these lathes I did a quick google search a week or two ago I think the set was maybe a hundred fifty bucks however there's nothing inherently wrong with plastic gears you've got these in your car and your other power tools and they could be okay if they're properly designed for the application so I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that if you use the lathes within its operating capacity the gears should hold up some reasonable amount of time in this situation I don't think it's so much that the plastic gears are a problem in that they could be dismissed right out of the gate I think it's more the fact that metal gears steel gears would give you the operator a little bit more room for error so on my lathe for example the Colchester if I try to take too heavy of a cut make some bonehead move and something jams up no the lathe might stall me more than likely I'll break a lathe tool ruin the work something along those lines but the lathe that would probably stall in this case you'll probably split this gear in two or strip the teeth then again it's got a 500 watt motor so maybe it would stall to again depends how all of this was designed into use the change gears again you'd consult the manual find the thread pitch or the feed rate you'd like to work at read off which gears you need and then replace them here in the back of the leaf for comparison my leave subscribes more to the mixed martial arts philosophy it does have some change gears in the back behind that cover but most of the work can be done right here on the gearbox all those gears that came with the lead and that ziploc bag are built into this gearbox and instead of having to loosen nuts and swap gears I can just pick a different gear set via this tumbler and various levers of course alright so after all that talking it's probably high time we tried this thing out I've got some cold rolled steel in there it's an inch and a quarter I think I'll think that's inch and a half bigger than 30 millimeters I'm gonna face and turn this with no end support the general rule of thumb is about a three-to-one length to diameter ratio in terms of stick out doesn't always work but close enough any more than three to one and you should think about using a dead center or live Center or some way to hold the work I haven't done anything to this machine in terms of trying to tune anything up or tighten screws other than anything that was immediately about to fall off I just want to see what it does right out of the box it is probably worth going through and snugging up the Gibbs cleaning the parts up adding some oil stuff like that I'd expect this lathe to do just fine on brass and bronze and aluminum that kind of stuff but I want to try it in steel I don't know if I said it already I'm gonna be spinning it at about a thousand rpm and whatever feed rate the gearbox is set up to [Music] [Applause] doesn't like that that might be too much stick out for this lathe let me find a shorter piece all right same material in diameter only now I've got a two-to-one stick out and I think I'm going to bump the RPMs up to 1500 we'll start with a 5 thousand cuts you know what that's rather respectable that was somewhere between a five and a six out of cut and I did bump up the speed a little bit for that last pass I'm gonna do a few more and just try to increase the depth of cut until something bad happens this is a ten thousandth of cut a tenth ow we're starting to get a little chatter on the end there let's try fifteen okay didn't like that sudden engagement but you know it powered through let's try this a top-speed 15,000 cut just like before Wow well how about that the feed rate was a little too aggressive I'm surprised good show alright so we need to slow down the feed rate I took off the cover and I'm having at the gears here but get a load of this we've got a very small gear go into a big gear that's attached to a small gear that's going to a big gear to get this lead screw to slow down we need either smaller gears here or bigger gears here without even looking at the charts simply browsing the extensive collection they've provided us with there's really nothing smaller or anything larger than the gears that are already on the lathe it's so exact oh this is as slow as we can get the feed rate to go seeing we can't easily adjust the settings for the tool that we want to use we'll have to change to a tool better suited to what we've got to work with in this case I just sharpened the small high speed steel blank I'll put this in a tool holder and we'll try this again for what it's worth I've also tightened the top slide the cross slide it will budge but it's uncomfortable to use I've essentially locked it out now because we're using high speed steel the spindle speed will drop like an order of magnitude will be at about a hundred 150 rpm I don't know what the specs on that little DC motor is but I assume it'll have more torque down here at the lower end than it did a thousand plus rpm [Music] [Music] [Music] that first pass was five foul this was tenth though it's doing pretty good let's go right to 20 it doesn't like 20 at that rpm it's trying to mix it up a little bit I'll just bump it up by eye 200 220 rpm that's the spring pass from before [Music] go down to the minimum I think we clocked this in at 80 rpm again it's gonna take a spring cut and it won't be 20,000 til it gets to that step you guys watch that I'm gonna go have a sandwich [Music] let's go back to 15,000 bump the speed up we've obviously tailed off on the torque on both ends now this will be about 250 rpm and 15,000 cut [Music] that I think is 20,000 I think that's going to be 25 as soon as it hits that next step let's try tent out [Music] surface finishes and all that bad kind of what should expect maybe from high-speed steel let's try it at 400 rpm 10th out the cut this tool probably won't last that long at that chip load but let's see what happens all right so I think that's about all I could get out of this thing keep in mind this thing is 550 watts that's probably less than a travel hair dryer surface finish on cold rolled steel is always tricky but you know what those little chips look rather respectable okay let's have a little heart-to-heart here my opinion is getting grimmer and grimmer the more time I spend with this I'm still of the opinion that if you had no other choice either because of budget or space or undetermined interest in getting a lathe this is probably still worth throwing five hundred dollars away on I still think it could be a lot of fun with some caveats first I wouldn't push this too hard especially on steel as you've seen the poor thing will do it but you're going to destroy the lathe in no time flat if you don't go easy if you insist on using something like this for steel work really close to the chuck and maybe stick with free machining Steel's hot rolled would probably be better than cold rolled though that stuff can be a bit gummy you can of course take on bigger projects but just keep its limitations in mind if you have the patience of a saint yes you could technically use this to turn a 3-inch steel around into a new gland nut for your leaking hydraulic cylinder but it's probably the last project a little leave like this might ever see think of it like trying to cut down a tree could you do it with a pocketknife given some time and determination I'm sure someone could but there are better albeit more expensive ways to do it and this lathe would end up looking just like I imagine that pocket knife would after its felled an old oak tree flip side this thing seems to have no problem at all the softer materials aluminium bronze brass and plastic of course I mean you won't be winning any races but the available power is more suited to softer metals and plastics and the finish will get on softer metals will likely be a lot better than what I've been demonstrating if you take some more time to sharpen your tools and set the Machine up for proper cutting speeds again for small projects this thing is great in a better than nothing sort of way or maybe as a general shop tool something like this could save your butt more often than you expect turning down small diameters squaring up pins cleaning of threads tuning fits between small parts maybe you need something to support your own prototype build or you've got I don't know a small engine shop something we're turning isn't the primary work you do I bet you'll find yourself walking over to something like this a lot but the trade-off is time there's a more babysitting you need to do with a lave like this and well if you start dumping more money into it well just try to do the math ahead of time maybe another three or four hundred bucks up front gets you a better investment which brings us full circle back to the plastic gears remember that thing I said about well-designed well this isn't that unfortunately in editing the video I noticed a crack in the big gear after my very first cut it hasn't completely failed but it's probably not long for this earth and when I went to change to these gears to cut the threads I realized why that crack was probably there the bores and key seats in these gears at least on my set are consistently under sized these are molded gears of course and the internal features are under sized I had to literally pry the big ones out and tap these other ones on with a hammer delicately of course but as I tap them on the steel shaft and keys these are mounted on sheared their way through like they pushed out a little wisp of plastic consequently they're now on there pretty tight which means they're stressed the big gear probably was right from the factory and with time or first use in my case the stress found the nice stress riser in the corner of the keyway and has started cracking the gear if this is the case for all these mini leads spend a few more bucks get the version that comes with metal gears if you'd rather not spend the cash I'd rig up some other way to power feet maybe add a small DC motor or variable electric drill to the other end of the lead screw leave the plastic gears out altogether and drive the carriage with another motor that wouldn't cover your backside for thread cutting though and while we're on the topic and standing here at my fine specimen of a lathe I couldn't drive the higher gear ratios to get me to a course or thread like I didn't want to demo a thread as fine as I did that's just not good showmanship but speeding up the carriage for a coarser thread means a higher gear ratio more movement of the cutting tool for every turn of the spindle which requires more torque from the motor more torque than this motor has to spare if I was committed to this I'd probably upgrade the motor with something bigger like a big DC motor and speed controller from your neighbors treadmill I mean come on you know they're just using it as a coat rack so all told would I recommend this lathe honestly I don't know what to tell you other than the answer is complicated if this was my only option the answer is a resounding yes but get the one with metal gears it's a fun little lathe and there a ton of projects you can do on it not to mention there's an absolutely huge community out there and tons of info on mods fixes improvements and tuning to get the most out of it but you have to have the discipline to stick to doing smaller projects or you may as well have thrown your cash out the window now honestly what are the odds that it really happened I mean once you have it come on you know the lathe is where everyone vents their aggression in me well apart from this little review slash a nostalgic reunion my plan is to break this lathe down physically psychologically and emotionally and build it back up into a small CNC lathe just for kicks but that's a project for another time for now thanks for watching hey you wait a minute are you thinking what I'm thinking can I use this little lathe to jump back in time and buy the version with metal gears give me a minute it was a little tricky not a lot of space to work with in here and as we saw quite a few bits made out of plastic but I think I got the eigenstate of the fermions wavefunction correct in the density matrix of the hilbert space to initiate quantum tunneling and I'm gonna put it in reverse since we're going backwards in time 50 days should be more than enough but as we saw the minimum here is 80 so I'll be doing some standing around but here goes nothing not what I expected to happen did I install that oh wait a minute this might be okay I think I know what happened here

Channel: This Old Tony

Views: 3,867,615

Rating: 4.8201699 out of 5

Keywords: variable speed mini lathe, minilathe, metal cutting lathe, hobby lathe, plastic gears, change gears, plastic change gears

Id: 05vUCdzhoe4

Length: 28min 18sec (1698 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 16 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/The_cogwheel]

He actually has a full size time travel lathe - he never explains how that one works like he does with this mini lathe though. He seems to be quite the VXer, though he never demonstrates any VX gear or concepts on his channel. You just see him use some VX phenomena for the occasional gag that he shrugs off as editing trickery.

[u/quagzlor]

He probably forgot to use aluminium foil

[u/Cantaimforshit]

He has a good channel