Metal Spinning

How To Make A Metal Spinning Lathe?

Building wood lathes or metal-spinning lathes are a lot effortless, simple and easy than building a metal-turning lathe. These machines don't have a cross-slide like a metal-turning lathe, so they don't require exactly ground ways and all the additional elements and machining that such pieces may need. In fact, these lathes may include not more than a headstock and a space to keep your tools.

You can buy a commercial wood-lathe and use it for metal spinning but if you have an old budget-priced drill press sitting at your home you can put it to good use to save your money. You can make a homemade metal spinning lathe by scrounging the motor, pulleys, drive belt and bearings from your old drill press and build a lathe around them!

Design of any metal spinning lathe has many limitations and parameters. Re-using parts from an old drill press might increase them. This may initiate a number of limitations -- for example the utilization of 19mm bearings, which means the mains-shaft of the lathe, was also bounded to 19mm in diameter.

The main spindle should be turned from 1214 free-machining steel for better results because of the reason that the chips from 1214 are small and blunt. If you are designing to turn something out of steel, then it is better to get some free-machining stock that may include 1214 or 12L14.

Metal spinning tools that are required to build the lathe are mostly done on my 7x10 minilathes it is really remarkable what these bits of oriental iron can do if you plan to work within their restrictions.

It is better to begin you spinning lathe with the headstock and project it so that the middle portion of the back plate set about 8 inches above the lathe-bed. This gives enough consent to spin a disk of metal 14 inches in diameter. The design of the headstock is exceptionally easy it will not require a lot of effort the main parts may include:

1. 2 pieces of 50x25mm (2"x1") which hold the shaft bearings
2. A piece of 25 mm (1") square down the middle so as to make an I beam.

With a little effort you will be greatly delighted with the level of precision attained with machining the headstock parts and gears they all fit together very tightly, entailing just a gentle hammer-tap to fix everything in its groove. When you are finished with this you can lift the whole thing up and it won't fall apart.

Just a word of warning -- You should be careful while building a metal spinning lathe as any wrong choice of tool can take all your strength and time. This project requires cutting of a lot of CRS so it is vital to have a power hacksaw before you start a project like this as the manual hack sawing can cause great pain and a sore shoulder and not only that it is way more time consuming than power hack sawing. If you have a good budget than it is vital to have a high-quality supply of sharp 18 tpi blades on hand. Spending your money on the right tools can save your time may also give better results and a professional touch to your project. Besides, cutting steel with a blunt blade is a dumb thing to do that you might regret afterwards.