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Hi everyone i am a new member from Dorking

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Miner:
Hi Mike,
And welcome. A few thoughts if that's ok with you? Unless your building air pistols, You might want to seriously consider a long bed Myford. You'd need it for air rifle barrels. And I think that a Myford in good shape would be a wise decision for what your wanting to do. You'll sooner or later need all the accuracy you can get from any lathe you buy. I'm not really up on information about air rifles or pistols. I know a lot more about the centerfire guns, But your U.K. gun laws are too restrictive for that. Walther? and a few more top manufacture's do offer proper barrel blanks that are state of art for accuracy and are priced to suit. There's a lot of gunsmithing forums around and you could learn a huge ammout that directly transfers over from centerfire machining to the air guns.

Pete

hopefuldave:
Hi Mike, from near Guildford, so not so far away!

I second the "long bed" suggestion, as otherwise you'll be limited to pistols if you want to make barrels... There are some interesting resources re drilling and rifling barrels on t'net, materials may be difficult to find, though - one good source of decent steel is Transit etc. half-shafts, once annealed you end up with a few feet of good quality high-tensile steel around an inch-and-a-half thick,  then it's time to learn about "gun drilling", an interesting field full of high-pressure pumps for coolant, D-bits, hardened drill bushings etc.!

I've had a go at anodizing, it's not as difficult as it might seem - battery acid and distilled water, a hefty battery charger, graphite brazing electrode rods (with the copper stripped off in Ferric Chloride PCB etchant), a plastic bucket and away you go! The real difficulty seems to be getting the dyes in small quantities (I tried inkjet-printer ink, with some surprises - who'd have though that black ink would give a wonderful copper-bronze colour?). The hard bit seems to be preparing the surface well enough before it goes in the tank - *any* marks or scratches will be more obvious once it's anodized...

As you're not too far away, you could have a look at Warco's offerings (they're just outside Godalming), they have various sizes and shapes of imported lathes/mills etc. (closed on weekends, though - helpful that!), or if you're up for a challenge there are a lot of small industrial machines coming up on Ebay - a bit more hassle in the transport / powering / installation, but a decent one will do a lot more than the smaller hobby lathes at around the same price, and Ebay tooling tends to be cheaper in the larger sizes! I always think "You can do small stuff on a big lathe, but not big stuff on a small lathe".

If you go the industrial route and need to produce your own 3-phase, there are folks on here (myself included) who know a bit about VFDs, phase convertors etc. to help you along the way :)

Dave H. (the other one)

doubleboost:
Hi
Mike
Welcome to Madmodder
John

t20:
Hi everyone sorry its taken a while for me to reply (busy weekend)


Thanks for the advise on the long bed, I have been  searching for a lathe and was leaning towards a boxford maybe an AUD as it has both screw cutting ability and power feeds, also seen a couple of utube vids with home made cnc milling machines, that looks like good stuff.

About the Air rifle, i considered that because i thought i would like to make something i can use and they looked quite straight forward (that's put the kiss of death on it :) ).  Anyway my £500 pound budget seems totally inadequate for what i want so some scrimping and saving is the order of the day.

Its good to see i have some local lads for support, hi picclock checked out the anodising on utube and that looks like a good idea and hi miner thanks for the advise on the long bed and the larger type lathe i was considering a small one but i see where you are coming from.
Hi hopefuldave thanks i can see me calling when i get the three phase problem


Thanks to all Mike

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