for guys that may of never tried to cut a internal thread or any thread here is a link... and may be afraid to ask......http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olC9xyHheDU, I like this guy,,,, I think he is very good....great to watch thru all is stuff refreshing .......he reminds of my dad,,,,,, I wish he was still around
Along with the "lathe being the only machine that can dupicate itself" thing I know all the old guys know about this newguy trick. Ask a new lathe operator how to make a square block on a lathe. It's not as hard as it first appears.
I read an article about a guy that built a duplicate of his Bridgeport mill using only his Bridgeport mill.
Nice work. I want to learn how to use my lathe for more than parting bushings. I think the best thing for someone to learn is just how you did, with an experienced guy overseeing your work.
yeah thats really the best way, somethings I like to try to figure out on my own, but this was actually for my 1st motorcyle Im building, and im not such a risk taker with two less wheels, esp with it being the part of the front end
Experience is about the only way to feel confident in your skills. Find jobs you can do, keep stretching your abilities, and never be afraid to try something new. In school, my teacher knew I was already working as a machinist, so he gave me more advanced projects than the other students. I had to make a triple-start bolt and nut when the rest of the cl*** just had to make a single start bolt. Because he challenged me, I was able to learn to do stuff I never would have tried on my own. If it's at all possible, take a cl*** from a local community college that offers them. You'd be amazed at what's possible on basic machine tools.
I have no experience at it, but I told myself I would one day buy a lathe and a mill for my shop. With that said, the lathe came first, although it is a little sloppy, needs the babbit bearings refitted or replaced. I also bought a Brigdeport mill and brought it home, haven't done much on it yet, as I still have a lot to learn on it, but I am not afraid to break tooling. I bought some cheaper tooling for the learning curve and haven't broken any on the mill yet. Broke quite a few at first on the lathe, but I think I have tested the limits enough now to not break many more. The local school here actually closed its Machine trades cl*** due to no enrollment. I wish I would have taken it in High school, but I hated math, and I know machining required a lot of math.
Look for any textbooks you can find, there should be lots of them out there. Learn how to calculate the basics, speeds and feeds for different materials and diameters, etc. That alone will save a lot of money on tooling. Also, many textbooks on manual machining were written years ago, and are exactly what the home machinist needs to know. I hate hearing how machine shop programs get shut down due to lack of interest, because once they are gone, they are usually gone for good. It's such a great trade and a very useful hobby for the exact people on this site. You can't always get what you want at Kragen, sometimes you need to buy raw materials and build it yourself. I've been doing it for years, and I'm still thrilled to turn out something from nothing.
I worked for the L.A. County Fire Dept for over 30 years and we did a lot of building inspections as part of our regular duties. I can't tell you how many machine shops I went into over the years and saw them slowly fade away because of no work for them in the U.S. I would talk to the owners and they would say how they would have to keep laying off employees just to keep the doors open, many winding up the only employee along with a son or wife. Pretty sad. I'm not trying to make a political statement, just my experience seeing it first hand.
yeah, I only know of 2 machine shops around our area, one is ours and the other one is litterally a few houses down the rd. we both help each other out on somethings if one has too much work and cant take a job. both businesses have been around since the 50's and have jobs come in from all over the US. my stepdad and uncle have made a good name for themselves over the years, and our business is still running strong today. like others have said, someone has to know how to do it, but not everyone wants to learn, which makes the people here on the hamb special!
I have a great deal of admiration for anyone wants to learn these older manual lathes or millers !! Keep you eyes out for old copies of Machinerys Handbook (AKA The Bible) a fat little book with very thin pages . It's chock full of tables and info. a must have !! Even old lathe and mill manuals are very informative. I had a set of books from Ford's academy that had everything from soup to nuts in it , loaned them out to let an apprentice do some studies, my bad. One thing I can't stess enough is personal safety while even playing around with these machines, they can and will do some real damage to you if you let your guard down.
No BS here... may still have a few things to learn though. Started my formal apprenticeship 31 years ago cutting threads on a clunker Hendey (or Hendley?) lathe and we had to be able to do RH and LH threads. Most of our thread cutting is now done on the CNC lathes, but every once in a while I have to make something on the Hardinge if we can't wait for an open CNC. We have a sharp apprentice working with us now, teaching him the tricks of the trade is fun. Bob
Even if you can grab a 20 year old copy of the MH book, the content is still the same for the most part. I was having trouble with a statics course in college, the text book ****ed... MH book to the rescue. Bob
You hit the nail on the head. I did the opposite ,I attended a trade school first then collage. The trade school gave me what I needed for engineering in collage.
my brothers and i came up in a family owned machine shop, my brothers live in south texas and have a shop on the family ranch, me, i moved to alabama about 27 years ago. i was a ironworker for about 6 years and when i got layed off from that job(union), there was not another in alabama. i went back to my old training and have been in machine shops sence, learning how to weld and cut as a ironworker really helped me in the shops. i'm now pushing paper and pen in the parts office, and sometimes wish i was still in the shop. being i'm 51 they thought i should start taking it easy so they had me train a man in the machine shop and a man in the hydrauilc shop, and moved my sorry ***. i do still put together the shop trucks and i got one to do in the next few weeks, really looking forward to it.
My chrome shop started as a machine shop. The owner was actually building a Ford GT-40 or what ever it is, a really low rear engine race car. He had looked at kits and was not impressed, so he was building his from scratch. Anyway, the chrome shop in his town was owned by an older gentleman who decided to retire. Noone showed any interest in purchasing the shop mostly because of the EPA regs covering such a business. Two employees were really upset, they wanted to purchase the business, but the old guy was firm on his price and preferred to close over an employee takeover. The 2 employees approached the machine shop owner and they layed out the plan. The machine shop was struggling to keep busy, most of their ongoing contracts were pulling out to have their parts machined for less money in Mexico. So the machine shop bought the chrome shop and those 2 employees set it up in the same building as the machine shop. The new owner actually spent quite a bit of time learning the processes and he is now a stickler for the details on stuff. It is a shame to see his machine shop sitting idle and covered with a light layer of dust, he does still maintain the machines, but I think the insulation in the industrial build is notorious for shedding dust. I know he does excellent chrome work, and I actually got to see an entire pontiac project(all the trim and bumpers inside and out) that was at the copper stage. I think he said it was staying copper, and man it looked like shiny pennies... With all this said, I found anothe guy selling out his machinist hand tools, He was a tool and die maker and has 4 roll arounds full of tooling for sale. He is getting me some info and some pricing figured up. I hope he has one of these bibles, I have heard of them and been looking without success so far.
machinst noob question... I can cut threads that work, and do it all the time, but how are you guys measuring the minor diameter? I always just make small cuts until a nut threads on, but there has to be a better way.
When cutting external threads without the mating part to use as a gage, you measure over three wires placed in the threads with a micrometer. Get yourself a Machinists Handbook. They are out there! I have my Dads that was printed in 1922.
For the Machinery's Handbook there are a lot on ebay. To me the older ones are better if you are into manual machining. For measuring threads you can use the three wire method. Here is a link to a pdf do***ent. http://littlemachineshop.com/instructions/ThreeWireMethod.pdf There are others on Google To me the most skilled craftsman is the manual machinist and they were never paid for their skills. With the demise of the manufacturing and the smoke stack industries in this country, big mistake in my opinion, the requirement for good machinist was reduced. The technical advances make with CNC machining has also helped reduce the need for manual machinist. In my opinion there will always be a need for the old time machinist. There are more home machinist today than you can imagine, you just have to find them. When the accountants took over the management of the large plants the dollar ruled. They, the accounts, didn't understand what an in house machine shop was worth and how it made or saved money for the company. A good in house machine shop traded time for money and keep the machinery running resulting in more uptime for the production equipment. The accounts said we can get the machining done in an outside shop cheaper, so the work started being formed out. They missed the part about the equipment not running while they waited for parts to be made. This resulted in profits for the company being reduced and many of the companies became marginally profitable while others closed and people lost their jobs. This continues today and I don't think it will change. The people with the machining skills and the equipment to do the work will always have a means to make at least some "part time money" if they want to do that. I think that the demand for this is going to increase as the economy continues to decline. Enough of the rant.
Around here we were very fortunate to have a lot of old-time Mare Island machinists, welders etc, some going back to WWII, some from the nuke sub age. Just listening to those guys, and getting to watch them in action in there home shops was a privilege. I have quite a bit of tooling and such that I got at the neighborhood garage sales when a few p***ed on, handmade precision chucks, handmade vises.. Some of the guys are/were hotrodders, ch***is builders, fixit guys, gun barrel makers. A buddy's grandfather was a WWII era welding lead man, made us kids a lot better every time we did something, and of course picked on our feeble attempts at welding without mercy. You could name pretty much any two metals off the top of your head, and he could tell you how to weld them together, what kind of rod or process, how hot to preheat, how slow to cool or to quench. One of the grandsons was wising off one day about how good he was, gramps grabbed two pieces of 1/2" plate and welded them together into a 90 angle with a torch and a couple coat hangers and challenged the kid to break it- that kid beat on it with a 20lb sledge for an hour before he gave up, gramps just grinned. Another old friend who's gone now was the head rigger on the building of the Guitarro, another old-schooler with pride- he cried like a baby when those klowns sank it at the dock (look it up). Even many years later if somebody mentioned it, he would tear up and leave the room
I haven't heard anyone talk about three wire method thread measuring for at least 20 years! That is real old time knowledge. I worked in an aircraft machine shop from 1982 until 1996 and the first thing I had to lean was internal single pointing threads. That is all I did the first year I worked in the shop. We still ground our own tools back then or sent them to the tool grinding shop. Carbide inserts were the stuff of dreams! I had a thread plug go-nogo gage for the internal threads.
There is a book called strangely How To Run A Lathe! That was put out years ago by one of the lathe companies, Atlas I think. It tells you anything you want to know about running a lathe. Check Amazon for a used one. I taught hundreds of kids how to cut threads when I was a shop teacher. Early thread cutting lathes could only cut 1 thread lead. To change the number of threads per inch you had to change the lead screw. The first lead screw had to be cut manually , that was installed in a lathe and another lead screw could then be generated. You can make a lathe with a lathe but not just like the one you start with.
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