Gallery, Projects and General > Gallery

Gingery Lathe and Accessories

<< < (17/24) > >>

vtsteam:
With the vertical pillar made up it's time to pay attention to the vertical slide casting. First step is to machine the top flat, and then use that as a reference surface for doing the underside. I'm using the square bar workholders on the milling table here.

You can see the half round channel left by the core when cast. It is rough and undersized here -- it will be bored larger once the upper clamping piece (another casting) is attached.

vtsteam:
After the top was flat, I removed the rectangular clamping blocks, and attached the angle clamping blocks to the side of the milling and boring table. Then clamped the vertical slide bottom up to machine the wear pads.

Note that the L shaped clamping blocks can either be attached with the base leg inward -- to widen the boring table -- or outward, as done here, to bring the clamp bolts closer to a narrow workpiece.

vtsteam:
Cleaning up the inside corner of the wear pad.

After I finished milling this slide I checked the sliding surfaces with machinist blue, intending to do a final hand scrape to bearing. I was amazed that it didn't need it, and how little time it had taken to make the slide ready for use. I couldn't get over the savings in time -- usually it took a whole evening to file and scrape a slide and install gibs. And that was after a lot of practice. Now I could have a working slide from a rough casting in minutes. Just amazing!

Henning:
Thanks a lot again for sharing! I'm watching and going like this  :jaw: most of the time!

vtsteam:
Thanks Henning!

The lathe is an incredibly powerful tool. It can make the parts of itself, and other machines. It can become another machine. The fundamental thing to realize is that its essential is a rotating arbor, and a linear moving set of slides.

If you think that way, you can think about the possibilities for performing different sets of tasks. you can attach work to the slides part, or you can attach work to the rotating part. You can extend the number of possibilities with the slides by adding a third Z axis to them. And you can further extend the slides by adding a rotary position as well as a linear position. That is the function of the rotary table added to slides.

You can add a slide direction to the head to increase its versatility, as well. This is in fact what Gingery did when he came up with his horizontal mill.Once I had built my basic lathe, I pored through the horizontal mill book and realized that it really was a lathe with a vertically adjustable head. In fact during the construction of that mill you actually build a tailstock for performing some operations -- maybe that is in the dividing head book, and maybe it was a faceplate for the mill -- can't quite remember and I don't have the book in front of me. But anyway, the horizontal mill and lathe share a very close heritage.

One difference in the Gingery machines is that the mill is quite a bit sturdier in construction. I wished at that point that I had realized the connection between the two kinds of machines and had built  Gingery's mill first with an idea of making it truly a dual purpose machine right from the start, a combination lathe and horizontal mill. That is in fact what lead me to start designing parts to add horizontal milling capabilities to my lathe. It isn't equivalent, but it certainly allows lots of milling possibilities.

The great value of all this is not only to Gingery machines, but to any lathe -- or horizontal mill for that matter. A recent thread query here on madmodders was a very understandable question: what use is a horizontal mill?

Well if you think about it in a different way, it is a rotating arbor with a slide in three dimensions. So it can be of great use if you don't think of it as only a horizontal mill. It is actually also a lathe -- minus a faceplate and tailstock. And you can make those. It is also an end-mill machine (like a vertical mill) if you make a big angle plate and mount it on the slide or mount a vice with the jaws oriented vertically on the slide, and put a collet in the work arbor to hold end mills.

We have the same basics repeated in many of these machine in the workshop. If we develop flexible thinking about them, we can come up with solutions  to various milling and turning (and grinding) operations with limited equipment.

Not to say a Bridgeport wouldn't be a nice thing to own, or the more machines the merrier!

 Just that part of the fun, and often the necessity, is to use our limited resources to create new capabilities for what we have and what we can afford.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page