Learning curve is steeper than GG but it's so much fun ...

lol i love lathes if i get i my workshop and fire these up the missus doesnt see me for days

Bloody expensive hobby though, 78 quid for castings for a model steam engine, 2000 quid for all the tools to make the darn thing!

The other glaring problem is that the plans I'm working to date from 1917 (which is quite recent for steam engine designs!) and specify drill sizes and threads that are no longer easily obtainable, luckily it seems that China still make everything I need!

Another problem is that 20 minutes on the lathe makes a mess that takes 40 minutes to clean up!

A tip for turning cast iron; take apart some old hard drives and take out the really strong magnets. Attach the magnets to a lump of wood and put that in a strong plastic bag. Next attach to bed of lathe under the cutting tool (use tie-wraps or similar) and it will collect up almost all the iron filings that you produce.

That's a nice piece of kit

Neodymium magnets yeah m8 i used these for Free energy motor project and striped around 50 drives for them kinda worked lol was fun making it. Still didnt quite recharge itself shame there was a million quid up for grabs if it worked i mainly use it for the South American flutes i make now real pretty sounding and the odd engineering bits i need to make up for the vintage bikes etc

Always wanted one,wait until you realy get into it .milling screw cutting ,the list goes on.i will stick with my 3d printer.some great sites out there ,I have been following a guy building a working miniature v 8 engine .

Dave

My issue at the moment is one of bravery, or rather a lack of it. I'm lacking the balls to dig in and take large cuts so I'm getting a lot of chatter and subsequently a poor finish.

More practice required methinks.

The yt'ers don't help as they make it look really easy but never actually tell you what speed they are using nor give much idea of the feed rate (lots of fast forwarding of videos) plus they all have much bigger (more manly iow) lathes.

This might help you.
It shows you some idea at what speed to spin different types and sizes of stock at.
I cannot find the manual / chart that came with my lathe, but it had something like the attached picture in it as a guide.

I am no expert at it.
But i soon learnt to take cuts slow and steady as the cost of replacing chipped cutting tips adds up..



picture link
http://gradstudentshop.usc.edu/assets/001/64641.pdf

I usually set up on a bit of waste get the speed etc right then add my working piece there again ai dont do alot of metals now and wood is generally pretty forgiving

There's a reason for that it will never be paid out, lol. Perpetual motion is impossible. I've seen these wheels with magnets on on youtube. They can be interesting, but when it comes down to it you could never get one to run continually no matter what you do (apart from using electro magnets, which is basically an electric motor, such as a drill motor). Still even a powered drill would eventually wear out and of course it's nothing like over unity as it has to draw power to operate.

Still as I say that prize is a fake in itself. It will never be paid out. James Randi (I think) started it really to help bring out scam artists, he knew no-one would ever be able to claim the money (a scam in itself which is ironic). No machine can run forever without maintenance and if it can't it won't win. So that's the end of that lol. Your not going to get much better than a waterwheel for cheap energy and if those won't win, because they need maintenance every now and then, then nothing will. If you take Randi's view of perpetual motion, even a Sun doesn't last long enough, which basically shows the prize is nothing more than nonsense.

@ Amenmoses. That sounds like a lot of money for the kit, although compared to how much they used to cost seems reasonable. I remember an engineer I knew got a job lot of lathes and CNC machines worth an arm and a leg many years ago. He got them from a school or college fairly cheap, he had a huge shed full of the things. He must have made a fortune off em in the end, not that he needed to, he was already rich.

They say you need a Lathe to make a Lathe ...
So where did the first one come from

From the chicken, of course. Or was it the egg?