when is a lathe too far gone to repair

okay so i had a thought after one of my last videos i i had discovered how badly worn my uh hindi lathes v ways are so it got me to thinking how bad is too bad how do you know when a machine is too clapped out to be of any value anymore to be salvageable or be worth your time worth the investment etc etc so the short answer as far as i can determine is it really never is too far gone from what i can tell now obviously this is subjective to whom you're speaking to if if you were talking about someone like joe posinsky uh he'd laugh at a lathe in this condition and rightfully so considering the types of work he does what he does for a living you wouldn't be able to tolerate a machine like this for that but um for us home gamers you know something like this if the price was right has its place in a shop now i'm glad this isn't my first lathe if this were my first lathe i would be a little disappointed i'd be more than a little disappointed disappointed it would be a very big issue to be honest with you but um before i get too far into the video one thing i want to mention is this isn't going to be you know like a professional um video this is mostly just my opinion and a little bit of digging i could do online so if anybody has links to other youtube videos that spell out details that i'm not aware of or i've missed if you could leave a link to it in your in your comments because i really couldn't find much information on youtube about this particular subject now there is information about information that touches on this on you know practical machinists and the other forums and whatnot and basically you know it all boiled down to the same things it's it depends on you and it's i mean granted if it had a large chunk of cast iron missing from it you know or something you know absolutely ridiculous like that that's another story but if you're just talking about wear and tear for all intents and purposes as far as i can determine there's virtually no reasonable amount of wear and tear that basic that would essentially make a lathe too far gone it is possible to rebuild these things professionally if a person so desires it's possible to hand uh repair make hand repairs on these things from what i'm seeing also um and the reality is one of the things that i had contemplated was a little bit out there in fact give me just a second i'll i'll grab you i'll grab a tool for you here considering how worn this lathe is i literally almost considered going over damaged spots with a small a really skinny belt sander but i've came up with better solutions after doing some research so not that i could really make it any worse almost no matter what direction i chose to go with it but there are some things that us home gamers can do to make a machine that's this far gone much much better if not damn near perfect so it's just a matter of how much time you're willing to spend in to put into it how much money you're willing to to put into it and it goes without saying that the vast majority of the wear is going to be you know within x number of inches of the chuck that's the you know the area where the saddle is constantly or most frequently you know rubbing on the the cast iron so obviously there are some crazy ideas as far as getting these things repaired and then there's of course more down-to-earth ways of making these repairs so i just showed you you know the little belt sander thing that i was contemplating i also have a finger sander which i thought you know if if the logan happened to be too far gone or in my opinion happened to be too far gone that maybe i would very carefully you know touch up the logan but again i have better ideas even if i were to take a grinder to the hindi i still don't think i could make it much worse if any than what it currently is um so anyways one of the things and that this is an idea that i had came up with before even getting or before even realizing just how worn the bed ways were on this so pretend for a second that you happen to have let me get this camera just a little bit here two mils that happen to be identical you you're you're not one of these guys that's lucky enough to have a large planer like josh topper or some of the other guys but let's just say for a second that you have two mills that are virtually identical to one another a very resourceful person could conceivably put one mil one mill right beside the other mill and link the x and y axis of the machines fairly easily now granted you would have to come up with a way to compensate for the different amounts of wear on the lead screws of the machines but you know there again we're thinking way outside the box as it is but the bottom line is you could essentially make a milling machine that could handle an extra extra long basically as long as you wanted to um piece of equipment obviously you could only work on so much of the machine in one shot before you'd have to reset or flip the machine or flip the part the opposite direction but anyways again crazy outside the box sort of solution one other crazy outside this box sort of solution that i had considered at one point with my other logan lathe was shortening the lathe cutting basically cutting out most of the bad part and moving the headstock further down the bedways essentially just removing the worn out section but again i've come up with a better solution so anyways those are the crazy ideas that i have that you know you just never know maybe it's the right solution for somebody out there but just not for me not at this point in time um one of the really slick thing well i'll get to the really really good idea last the first thing obviously is a lathe can be disassembled down to the bed and professionally ground in now i can't say for sure exactly how expensive it is it does look like there are some places where it's fairly reasonable in cost now keep in mind i'm one of those guys that is a major major cheap ass so i say that with a grain of salt or take it with a grain of salt but when you consider the cost of a good lathe a good used lathe i would say it would be a reasonable cost to repair a lathe that was clapped out as far as the handy of course that's not likely the direction i will go because i will never have time to disassemble the hindi lathe that far and while i love the hindi lathe i'm not that much in love with it if you know what i mean anyways the really slick thing that i stumbled onto on youtube and i'll hopefully i'm pretty sure i saved this video i will put a link to this video in my in the description of this but the one thing i came up or came across somebody had built a hand plane to basically they were from what i could tell in the video basically they were had it set up in such a way that it was almost like a handheld shaper if you will they were manually moving it down the the bedways and then they would increment either the depth of the cutter or um the step over of the cutter i'm not crystal clear on on just exactly what that was now also the video i saw it on was i don't know if it was a south bend but something with flat bedways so it would take a different setup to do a machine with v ways like this but there's certainly no reason why it couldn't be done like that and you know for that matter there's nothing to stop a person from mounting and this just kind of popped into my head but bear with me a second here nothing to stop a person from building a similar type of tool and mounting something like this with grinding stones to get similar results or at the very least to get it down closer to where you can manage it with hand tools more effectively so this is just a very very general overview by someone who's not a professional by any stretch of the imagination but the bottom line is if you have the desire and you have some skills basically you should be able to bring back virtually any machine from the precipice of disaster and like i said if if you guys know of other videos that go into better detail or points that i've not brought up definitely stick them in the comments section because this has been kind of a tricky subject to do some research on so anyways i've got i'm still working on uh putting together some ideas for another video with regards to delays but um i think i might try to save that video for when i'm down in austin vacationing possibly or maybe when i get back so in the meantime it's next thing up is mower deck maintenance yay yeah all right anyways until next time

Channel: Craig Tate

Views: 5,461

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Id: ypq1fCxZcTg

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 27 2021