Gingery Lathe and Accessories

[vtsteam]

And the second pass.

[andyf]

This is fascinating! Can hardly wait for tomorrow's episode.  Shame you aren't putting it out as a DVD.

Andy

[vtsteam]

Thanks AndyF ten years ago I thought I would write a book about it, which is why I have so many photos, but I never followed up on it. After joining you fine folks, it seemed a shame to just keep the photos unpublished just for a book I had never written.

I could still write one anyway, I guess. More step by step, like the Gingery books -- I would have to measure everything, and make drawings, and write instructions beyond what is just sampled here. And then look for a publisher somehow. Lindsay Books is no longer in business as a publisher -- and that was who I had thought it would suit best.

Maybe I could do it as just an e-book rather than a paperback. At any rate I will still post pix of interest in this thread through the end of the series. Doesn't seem to be boring anyone.

Thanks for all of your enthusiasm, guys!

[vtsteam]

After milling the way location, that reference surface was bolted to an angle plate and then I faced the base of the vertical ways on the faceplate. I like these Gingery pattern angle plates because one leg is shorter and radiused -- so it can be placed closer to the edge of the faceplate, to accommodate larger work. Each long leg has one tapped hole and one through hole, for ease of bolting up. The base legs have two tapped holes. These are in line and work well with radial slots in a faceplate.

btw, the turned aluminum seems to have a good non- skid grip that I believe wouldn't necessarily be improved if it were polished steel or iron. I have a shiny purchased faceplate for my Atlas lathe, and don't like it quite as well. I may actually cast an aluminum faceplate for that lathe.

The ease of using separate mandrels for turning and milling by simply loosening two setscrews on pulleys in the headstock and transferring was becoming apparent. I liked it better than maintaining a single mandrel and removing the faceplate because it was difficult to maintain faceplate alignment -- even when marking the positions on faceplate and mandrel. After this point I started casting workholding fixtures, like faceplates, and chuck backing plates directly onto their own mandrels. They stay in perfect alignment that way, and it is therefore much quicker to change over.

[vtsteam]

Now that the base is squared to the way face of the pillar (I guess that's the proper term) it is time to attach the steel slab that will be the actual way. The base is set on the lathe ways and a machinist square is used to align the steel piece. One screw holds it in place and two two small pre-drilled 3/32" holes at the top are spotted through to mark locations for drilling and tapping to accept the other attachment screws.

We are again using the actual parts we want to be in alignment as their own references -- in this case the lathe ways and the vertical ways are directly aligned with each other through the machinist square. Naturally you don't have to do it this way, and the vertical portion could be aligned with any flat surface off of the lathe. But it becomes a habit to use the actual parts for reference or metal removing operations, wherever possible -- and in many cases this does make a difference to the accuracy of operations. It's also a satisfying way to do things.

[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  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.

[vtsteam]

One more thing -- forgot to mention. Besides its other essential components of a rotating arbor and a set of slides, a machinist's lathe also has a fixed bed way -- and this supports the tailstock, which becomes a fixed reference point. That's actually an important piece. A fixed extension of the headstock/rotating arbor.

The equivalent in a typical horizontal mill is the overarm!. If you attach a tailstock type barrel and adjustable plunger and center to a horizontal mill overarm, you have a lathe. In the case of the overarm -- this fixing reference beam slides in and out of the headstock, as opposed to the tailstock of a lathe sliding over the bed ways. But it can serve the same function. In fact a fixed overarm-- not necessarily circular in cross section, except at the attachment point, with a sliding, true tailstock could be made as an accessory to a horizontal mill if desired. I believe David Urwick designed a combination machine using an inverted bed ways, with a circular section, and a novel triangular sliding gib key. His work should be familiar to British model engineers, as he wrote extensively on this and other very interesting creations in the field of hot air engines in Model Engineer..

In the Gingery horizontal mill, there is no overarm, there is instead a fixed lathe style way. An "underarm" if you want to think of it that way. Either of these perform the same stationary reference function that a lathe bed way does.

[vtsteam]

One more thing I also forgot to mention -- the lathe analogue for the bed ways and tailstock  on a horizontal mill would be an overarm with tailstock type fitting and center. Ideally a usable taper which you could mount things in other than just a center. But I forgot to mention the analoge for a lathe's tool holder.

That could be any conventional type of lathe tool holder mounted to the horizontal mill's sliding table. That's quite similar to the way it is handled on some lathe boring table set ups.

In fact if someone had very reduced floor space, and for that reason alone, was considering a mini lathe of limited capacity between centers, it might be possible to acquire at small cost a used horizontal mill of comparatively  husky proportions, but reasonably small footprint, which could be adapted into a very strong lathe -- capable of doing good heavy cuts, with a big faceplate capacity. And usable as a mill as well.

6" of vertical travel on a horizontal mill translates into a 12" facing capacity as a lathe.

[vtsteam]

Back to the Gingery lathe milling attachment......

This is the clamping piece that goes over the vertical slide. The semi-circular channel will will form a clamping bore and eventually accept any of the lathe's cast on arbors and work holding attachments. The original purpose here is to accept a rotary table for milling the Tesla disk slots which was the original motivation for this particular project.

Here the clamping piece is being surfaced.

[vtsteam]

Here the clamping block has been attached to the vertical slide, and the through hole is being enlarged. Afterwards it will be bored to exact size with the boring bar.

The vertical slide ways have been bolted to the milling table. This drilling operation again takes advantage of the fact that the workpiece is in its proper finished working position, and being driven along the ways to insure that the hole is parallel with the lathe ways, rather than drilling and fabricating from measurements and measured set-ups.

[vtsteam]

And here is the basic vertical milling attachment put together and ready to fly cut a surface -- probably as a test -- can't quite remember what that workpiece was for!

Notice that the lathe's faceplate is being used as a vertical milling table, and that the lathe's 2 jaw chuck is bolted to that as a work holder. The milling spindle has replaced the faceplate arbor in the headstock. The lathe is now backwards, in a sense!

We are now at the stage where we are able to take advantage of interchangeable parts, and have built up a library of useful and reusable patterns to further extend this machine, or build others.

While it looks finished in this photo, the faceplate/milling table is still not a rotary table -- there isn't a means of rotating it yet, but it can be clamped and used to mill parts on a large flat surface -- larger than the horizontal milling table, at this point.

[vtsteam]

The final stage in building the milling attachment was adding a big angular measurement sector of aluminum to the vertical slide, and a handle and arm (tommy bar) to rotate the work arbor and rotary table (faceplate).

The handle can be seen mid right, and there is a black aluminum index strip also attached to it that gives a reading against the graduations on the sector. I only made one index mark, since there was already sufficient accuracy for my needs with such large spacing of the graduations, but I could have put 10 marks on the black strip and made a vernier reading that way for measurements of tenths of a degree.

To make the markings for the sector, I printed out a scale with a computer printer from a layout I did in a simple cad program. This was glued to to the aluminum sector. To turn the work arbor a full 360 degrees you would need to do that in 4 steps, releasing the arbor to bring the handle back to zero after turning the full range of 90 degrees.

The handle had a wonderfully simple mechanism for attaching and releasing to the work arbor, as needed. The work arbor was 5/8" diameter. So I simply took a 5/8" machinery collar (shaft collar) and removed the set screw. from it. The handle rod consisted of a length of 5/16" steel rod with the end threaded to match the setscrew thread. It simply screwed into the machinery collar. You could grip the arbor by twisting the handle, or release it by twisting in the opposite direction.  The top of the rod had a cast-on grip of aluminum. I used a wooden file handle as a pattern when I cast it. This whole mechanism was practically put together from ready-made components.

To turn the rotary table to any particular angle all you do is twist the handle, tightening the machinery collar on the work arbor and then rotate the arbor to the angle desired.

If it is more than 90 degrees, I would first rotate to 90 degrees, twist the handle to loosen the collar and bring the handle back to zero, then twist to tighten and proceed to the measurement desired. That's all there was to it.

This is the last picture in this series. It is of cutting a scroll housing for the Tesla disk turbine (for an experiment trying it as a compressor, rather than a turbine). The Gingery lathe, and own milling attachment are finished and doing interesting work.

Thanks to madmodders for asking me to write about this, sort through these old pictures, and get them out for people to see. I hope it stimulates people to imagine new possibilities for their own equipment if they have a limited shop or limited means. Again thanks also to David Gingery's inspiration and guidance through his books.

 

[dsquire]

VTsteam

For taking the time to organize and post all that you have on the "Gingery Lathe and Accessories". I am sure that this will change a few peoples minds (in a good way) about casting their own lathe and accessories, I know that it has changed mine.

Cheers 

Don
 

[mhh]

The gingery is an amazing project!

I've always liked that you really don't have to have any prior knowledge to machining to get started!

Nice work! 

[RussellT]

I liked that, what a great way to learn.

Russell

[millwright]

Well Done, A great project and what a good way to learn some engineering practice and machining technique for you, I think by the time you had finished it you could say you have served a good apprenticeship
John

[Henning]

I feel a need to be able to cast aluminium all of the sudden...   

Thank you very much for sharing! 

[Rob.Wilson]

Inspirational post VTsteam   

One of the best threads I have read in a wile  ,TRUE home shop engineering from foundry to machine    very impressive .



Rob

[NormanV]

I've started to build a Gingery lathe on two occasions. First time, when I lived in Kenya, I had a local foundry and had all the castings made in iron and then machined at a Don Bosco training school. I left Kenya before it was complete and gave the lathe to the Don Bosco school.
Second attempt was when I lived in the Falkland Islands, there I had to be totally self reliant. I got hooked on casting and made all sorts of stuff. I used peat as fuel for the foundry, there were unlimited supplies of the stuff, free, other than the effort of digging it.
Now I am back in UK, I brought the incomplete lathe with me and reading this thread has made me want to get started on it again. I am a bit concerned about the cost of fuel as it will need to be bought this time round.
Unfortunately mine is no where near as good as vtstream's.

[vtsteam]

Thank you all very kindly. It is a privilege to be here, for me. Great doings all around!

Norman,

you can use wood to melt aluminum. Believe it or not I made a lot of the turbine castings from a clean up fire of fallen pine boughs. If you do this, use long tongs and do it when the fire has built up some good glowing embers. Put the crucible right in amongst the embers, and it will certainly melt. Don't worry if embers or wood bits drop in. They will actually absorb oxygen, and cover and protect the melt. Just skim before pouring, and you will see shiny metal underneath.

Or even better, you can use charcoal from such a fire in a foundry furnace if you make one. In this case Just rake out the glowing embers with a leaf rake and put them out. They will be charcoal. It's not hard to build up enough for several melts this way.

This charcoal is very hot burning compared to store-bought charcoal briquets. In fact out of curiosity, I once stuck a 2 foot length of 1/2" dia concrete reinforcing rod down into the aluminum melting furnace -- using homemade charcoal, just to see what would happen. Well what happened was that rod pretty quickly started to slip down into the furnace, so I pulled it out rather hastily. looked like a fireworks sparkler on the end. After the furnace cooled there was a small puddle of iron at the bottom.

Another way to make charcoal would be to put cut up wood scraps into your furnace and once it is going well, cover it over and block the tuyere. The wood will convert inside the furnace. It will only yield about half a furnace full, but it will probably be sufficient of a melt, since some of the room in a furnace is normally taken up by the crucible.

Don't let the cost of fuel stop you!

[doubleboost]

I have just read this post
You are putting many of us to shame
Very well done
A great post with good pictures
Thanks
John