Technical Mill lathe buyers let’s see what your doing

hello hambers
As a mill and lathe Technician
, i thougt it would be cool to
Show what we do for professional or private machining work
Here in France is a very popular and very rare race car
I am talking about the famous Renault 8 gordini
(The red one was mine )
I had some of those cars and still love them
Did you know American people
Philippe Charbonneau was the same French guy who designed the Chevrolet Corvette and the Renault 8 ?
So here are what i am working on since a lot of years
I am rebuilding some parts for Renault 8 manual gearbox because those parts aren no more avaible
Few pics to explain what i am talking about
First is the rear end of the gearbox
It is not a aluminium foundry
I machine from a block
Second pic is the tachometer gear
Let’s see what you’re working on your mill lathe machine

 

Nice work. That is some complex machining, especially if you did it on manual machines.

 

Philippe Charbonneau was the same French guy who designed the Chevrolet Corvette and the Renault 8 ?

I noticed the question mark which reinforces the common belief that Harley Earl designed the Corvette.
Charbonneau worked for GM and with Earl but was not the chief Corvette designer.

 

.
Cnc are involved
The hard part here is i had no (oops don’t know the right word)
I had no « draft or no any 3D tool « to work with
I had to take my old caliper and burn my brain to go on

 

I owned a red 65 R-8, loved that little ****box.
Nice car.

 

I had a bunch or R10's over my poor years when I purchased my first house.
Great car for the times.
I almost purchased an R8 Gordini sans engine.
I did have Renault Dauphine Gordini when I was very young.

 

Please tell me you had a rotary table for that gearbox case part. Very nice work. Regatds, Jerry

 

I learned how to make a steel cube on a lathe the other day- sweet!

 

I made some gauge spacers for my model A at my buddies shop... first time using a lathe for me... good learning experience. Totally basic for you machinist guys but great fun for me. Used some aluminum pipe and had to turn it down (see I even learned some new terms...lol) inside and out to make it right

 

Nice work, Oldsfrench. Here are come parts I made for my '36 Dodge: a beehive oil filter housing, tail light bezels and lenses, new inserts for two '49 Pontiac speaker grilles (cut on a waterjet) that will go in the new dashboard that I will make some day, and two brackets for one of my brothers to mount lights on the luggage rack of his daily driver truck.

 

Oldsfrench, Maybe a little language barrier, but the housing does not look like it was machined from a billet block . What type of machine did you use ? How did you determine what dimensions and tolerances were needed? It looks like a casting that was machined with CNC controls.
In your second post you mentioned not having a "draft" which I ***ume you mean a "drawing or blueprint". Then you mention using a "caliper" to measure the part. I can give you some credit for a language barrier, but you need to explain a little better, because right now what you have said doesn't make sense.
Let me explain a little. The backside of the housing doesn't look to have been machined from billet......not just because of the texture, but a few other details. To machine a part with that many complex moves, you need some way to make a drawing and you need an original part to measure not only the simple dimensions, but the complex blended radius that intersect at unknown points as well as the non-standard curves. While cutting things like I mentioned are easily done with a CNC machine, you have to have dimensions to program the machine. That means you have to have some pretty serious inspection equipment to measure an existing part.......not just calipers. Please explain how you managed .

 

I don’t know,,,it looks like a machined part to me,,,,,looks like it was blasted after the mill work . There are a couple of lines that are very close,,,but ,,,leave a cutter line near it .
Looks great !

What I’m really impressed with is the tail light lenses that Lepus made.
They are better than new !

Tommy

 

You are right Tommy
The back side is blasted
Sorry for my poor langage specially for
Technic words
I’ll post more pics soon
I have to find other pics in an old computer
I really took a caliper
I had the original part in my hands

 

That is what I made

 

Here is the original part
You can see the caliper

 

I wish I could make parts like you.Really nice.But I only have manual machines,lathe from the -60s and I think the milling machine is from the 1920-30s

 

Manual machining are hard to work with
You must be talented with your hands and brain
Cnc can make more complicated parts
But they just do what you say them to do

 

Here is a blower drive adapter I made recently...

 

Hey Oldsfrench, you do good work there! I have an old manual lathe and mill and have taught myself to use them, but looking at your drawings with the all the dimensions has made my brain hurt!

 

Long sleeves and lathes do NOT get along. Ask me how I know.

 

Beautiful work guys,,,,,

Oldsfrench,,,,no reason to apologize for your English ,,,,,,it is a lot better than I can do for the French language,,,,LoL.
About all I know is Escargot,,,and,,,,les miserable,,,,, .

And Hansen,,,,,your manual machines are great,,,,,it’s a lot more than I have .
Trendz,,,,excellent work .

This is hot rodding,,,,it’s all about doing the best you can with what you’ve got !
I am so proud of the younger guys working and trying to keep this going .
It amazes me to see pics of these old cars from around the world,,,,,in places I would never suspect of seeing an old American hot rod !

Great job everybody!

Tommy

 

A good manual machinist can demand 2 or 3 times the pay of a CNC guy.

 

Just by looking at the sketches he made, it is obvious that he knows what he is doing.

 

Happy 444 it would be very wise for you to pull up the sleeves of your shirt past your elbows. Anyone that has worked on these machines can tell you how fast you can get snagged and pulled into the machine. That's a good way to get seriously hurt. It's a very dangerous practice. Be safe.

 

My 13X60 South Bend nearly removed a sweatshirt from me. Will not make that error again.

 

@oldsfrench awesome work and cool build and wish I had a cnc. . @j hansen very cool machines and shop ,what is the brand of mill. I haven’t see that model before and it’s cool.
I had a apprenticeship at a mold and model shop back in the day. Not a lot of CNC machines especially small shops . It was amazing the work that was done just using mechanical machines.
My old machines and as the sign says Standard Service

 

let's see...the day before yesterday, I turned down a carburetor part, for a B&S engine in my 60 year old mini bike, using my 1946 South Bend lathe. The part is a reproduction, and was made wrong, by about 0.005".

I haven't made any fancy car parts like that transmission case, or speedometer gears. But I use the lathe and mill often, mostly just for little jobs, so they become indispensible.

 

You are very lucky- the machine wouldn't even slow down if it ****ed you in. The one thing I don't like about my old 16x60 South Bend is the on/off/reverse switch, mounted on a stalk coming up from the back, so you have to reach over the work area to operate the switch- better not have anything dangling. Been around a couple bad accidents, and reasons why machines seem to have a ridiculous amount of guards these days. First one when I was about 14, one of the farm families in the Southern Tier of NY had an old belt-drive sawmill, and they were using it during the winter. One of the sons leaned over the exposed blade shaft to fill an oil cup on a bearing, and a square- head set crew snagged his heavy winter coat, and he was instantly gone. Second was a post hole digger on the back of an 8N tractor, fellow helping the neighbor with a new fence. The old guy didn't think it was drilling fast enough, so he decided to climb up on the top link off the three-point hitch for some weight, dangling rawhide shoelace- he went round and round inside the hitch

 

Oldsfrench's prints look a lot like my old engineering prints from my days building streets and freeways- all those "R"s being radius points for all the big and little curves. That one would be similar to a plan for a street roundabout, with planters around the outside. Now imagine you just had the surveyor stake all that out, and then some truck driver backs in and runs over a half-dozen of those radius points lol

 

I just picked up this Logan 14” lathe. It’s in good shape other than a few bushings in the carriage(& the color). It had been sitting for well over a decade.