College Apartment Job Shop?

[michiganbuck]

A dry or wet lathe with homemade cribbing can be pretty clean, so it is not an impossible venture.
An opposite-side hand lever cut-off device can be handy on a small lathe.
I have never used one but a tail stock turret might be good also, so you might go to chamfer/drill / tap quickly.

 

[Donkey Hotey]

Openings - Farrar Corporation

Job Openings Consider these rewarding job opportunities at Farrar Corporation: Foundry Careers & Job Openings for CNC Machine Operators in the Topeka/Fort Riley/Junction City & Wichita Areas Farrar Corporations office is located in Manhattan, Kansas; along with one of our two machine shops. Our...

farrarusa.com

You have a surprising number of shops there in town, including above. It would be nice to graduate with casting experience in addition to other manufacturing methods. Know how many engineers I know with any casting experience at all? ONE and that was why I recruited him for the internship while he was in school. Oh, plenty of engineers think they know something about castings but, they don't.

 

[Orange Vise]

New member, long-time reader here. I'm getting ready to start classes part-time for the semester while I work 2nd shift at a major local company as a machinist (CNC operator really, machinist just looks nicer on their website). I am pursuing a degree in engineering. I have my own apartment in town, and I was thinking about buying a manual lathe to do light machine work for supplemental income.

With three major things going on in your life - school, job, and a side hustle - you'd truly be juggling.

One or two things are probably going to give. School is often the first.

 

[dalmatiangirl61]

Perhaps a fortune could be made, but on principle and faith, I won't be making sex toys or drug paraphernalia. Though I understand that was probably humor.

While it was a touch of humor, it was also based on past experience. I have always taken the stand that it was not my job to control what people did with things I made, or judge them for it, as long as they were willing to pay. The only line I ever drew was firearms parts, because there are laws that would directly affect me.

 

[Stirling]

I second renting a shop and live in a rv. I could never imagine machining where I eat.
I have a attached garage where I do work. All enclosed cnc’s and I try hard to be clean. Still picking chips out of the carpet inside tho.
If that’s not bad enough coolant or smoke in your living space, hard pass.

Go hard and have fun. I won’t say no. But in an apartment is not how I would do it.

As for machines. I’d go mill. Then you can setup a collet for small turning work as well… just a thought.

Fiber laser work, 3D print, cad work. Those may be alternatives.

If I where you I’d focus on a product. Not jobbing when in school.

School is $$ and demands your attention. So is jobbing.
Developing a product won’t leave customers calling you wanting results and Inconvenient times. Do can put it on the side burner during hard school times. Then pick it up and keep developing when your time is free.

 

[Donkey Hotey]

This also all depends on what you want to do with your life.

If you want a life working for medium to large companies as a design engineer (mechanical, aero, manufacturing) then they're going to look at your resume and experience when you graduate. We all know doing it yourself takes more skills and effort but, most recruiters and hiring managers don't see it that way. Five internships, at real companies, beats "I designed and made my own products and turned $50K a year on my own."

Most big company managers don't get it and most don't care. I sat in post-interview discussions and the guy who designed and built his own supercharger system wasn't very impressive but, boy that PhD student who was proud he knew how to change the air filter on his car--that's who we're looking for! You could be an Arduino-building god but, those same managers somehow think that's hobby-related and not really relevant experience to "real world" electronics. Sadly, these are not made up examples.

Knowing how parts are made is absolutely awesome experience for you as an engineer, BUT the big companies will look down on it since most have the luxury of believing that academic knowledge trumps applied science.

If you want to graduate, work a few years for medium to large companies, then strike out on your own, then getting started early might be your best avenue. There is always the chance that you'll never work for those companies but, you learned what you needed and started early on the journey.

 

[BajaFire]

Speaking as a guy who runs the engineering machine shop at a college...
I hire students as shop assistants to help with training other students, managing labs, making prototypes for Senior-level design projects, etc. Does your school offer something like this? Something to keep you in academia (where you can ask your fellow students for homework help) while making a few bucks and getting your make-things-with-my-hands fix satisfied?

Speaking as the guy who used to design parts and send them out for quote...
The parts that both fit on a minilathe and are imprecise enough to be produced by it are also not expensive enough to justify my writing an RFQ email to you. I'm thinking of the ~$100 small shafts, pins, and such: one-off parts that I'd just lump in the RFQ for a whole job.

That being said...if your business venture doesn't turn out, you'll at least have a machine for personal work.

 

[Donkey Hotey]

Since I'm dumping a stream of consciousness on you, I'm going to partially retract what I said about working on your own being good for your long-term interests if you intend to be self-employed. No, that scenario is even more inclined to want to get a job at that company I linked earlier.

Here's what we can discover from one of their programmer position listings:

"We have machining centers from DMG-Mori that include NHX horizontal mills, NTX mill-turn machines, Okuma mills, as well as DMG Mori and Okuma lathes."

So if you got a job "sweeping floors" you'd eventually work your way up to being an operator. They do run a night shift and advertise flexible hours. They also have a ton of openings so they'll possibly take what they can get.

What I see is the chance to get paid to learn the basics of those machines and stand around, looking at them running parts. Do you know how to power up, home each of the axes and jog the table around any of those? Do you know how to change the active tool? I don't mean change the cutter, just change which one is actively in the spindle right now?

How about changing a worn cutter? Touching off or setting the length of that tool? You aren't going to get that chance in your apartment. Nothing you learn on a small lathe will matter in your long-term except that you don't want a miniature lathe. Getting to stand in front of their machines and figure out even the basics of the controls will put you months ahead if you ever decide to buy your own CNC.

How about fixturing design skills? How do they hold onto the raw castings as they go into the machine? Do they use locating pads? Do they manually dial in a reference surface, skim cut it and make it the master datum? Do they use tooling balls for subsequent part positions? Pads? How and where do they clamp the part? Are there vibration problems with that method that could be improved?

Inspection: what is a thousandth of an inch in real life? How hard or easy is that accuracy to attain? Why do these parts inspect fine today and they're out a week from now? What kinds of micrometers do I like? What do I hate? What's a CMM? What's a robotic CMM? What's six sigma and how do they get away with that for inspections? Was the designer smoking crack when they said they needed this 1/8" plate to be flat to within 0.002"?

Part design: "Man, if the engineer had only added a sacrificial pad over here, I could knock off 30% of the machining time but as it is, this thing vibrates like hell." You'll see good and bad examples of where tooling points were located, how different features were machined, what a long buggy whip endmill looks like trying to get wayyyy down in a pocket because the engineer went apeshit with their 1/8" radius fillet tool in Solidworks and didn't consider how deep the feature was. You'll know what a mill turn looks like and what it can do. You'll hear people bitching about things and what it can't do. You'll think of your own ideas on how to solve that.

I would look at the entire experience as another class, except you're being paid to learn all those things. You get a semester in school on Solidworks and now you're "the hotshot kid who knows Solidworks." Maybe they toss you some fixture design tasks. You get feedback. In theory, even if you're working for absolute morons, nobody can take away all the observations you'll make on your own and it will certainly be better than that.

 

[Scottl]

@memphisjed Could you elaborate? I hear a lot of stories about successful businesses being started in the home. I don't see this as a maybe income, I'm told by someone in the industry that this kind of work is always available, and I'll be working pretty hard to be profitable. I probably will use it for personal projects (If I have time, Ha!) but I'm not trying to justify the purchase with income, income is the goal, and hobby projects are maybe if I have time.
@Stoney83 I hadn't considered lasers or 3d printing. I don't know where I would go to get work for one of those machines, since from my understanding they are generally reserved for prototyping, but I could be wrong. The only potential clients I can imagine are college students, and they already have access to those machines at my school. We have a pretty good makerspace and an excellent engineering department; but again, I'm speaking from ignorance. I'll have to do some research.
@EmGo What is that machine? It looks like a serious CNC machine in miniature.

Most businesses that are started at home begin in the garage or basement. About the only way to make money with a manual lathe in your situation would be to come up with a few small products that you could make and sell on ebay. Come up with small stuff that fills some niche need and use stops and other gimmicks to turn them out quickly. If they catch on they'll eventually be cloned in China at which point you abandon them and come up with something new.

Even though I have a home shop occasionally I'll buy a reasonably priced small whatever rather than make my own version. One such purchase was from an ad in the NRA's American Rifleman magazine for a hammer strut support block for the older Ruger .22 rimfire semiauto pistol. There is an issue where occasionally someone will make a mistake in reassembly and the hammer strut gets wedged in an almost unfixable position. I've never done this but I've heard the horror stories so I spent the $15 bucks or so for a small block of steel that wedges behind a torsion spring to prevent this.

 

[jim rozen]

Ha ha. This is my first lathe which was installed in the hallway between the living room and the kitchen, in an apartment in Somerville, MA around 1982 or so. Never made any money with it but was a decent start at learning machining.

 

[LOTT]

In addition to the other issues noted, it's hard to make things with ONLY a mini lathe. You end up needing a grinder, and a saw, probably a drill press, maybe a tumbler, etc.

In theory you can make do for all those things with a lathe only, like in some post-apocalyptic/third world/war zone situation. But you're in Kansas, not Syria.

I don't say this to discourage you. For several years when I was your age I hauled around my grandfather's 12" Craftsman lathe, including to a rental while in school. But it was for hobby use only; I made all sorts of little things with it, made everything except money.

 

[EmGo]

It has been a while since I've run a manual lathe, but I don't remember it being so messy and dirty.

I wasn't concerned about "messy", anything little you can put in a box. It was more a case of "what can you make ?"

On a little lathe, just about nothing. A little mill, lots more stuff that people would buy. Desktop fiber laser would probably be even better.

 

[F35Machinist]

If you want to start a machine shop, go all in and rent a commercial space and buy a used CNC mill or lathe at an auction. Live in the shop and sleep on a roll up futon, not in an apartment. Don't worry about any of the paperwork bullshit and don't start an LLC. Don't tell any level of government that you're starting a business. Just operate as a sole prop and get a sellers permit and bank account. In my experience, starting a shop takes absolute 100% commitment. You should not have any other obligations. I had an off shift job for years while I started my shop, but I can't imagine going to school full time, having a day shift job or having a family at all while starting a machine shop.

On the other hand, if you want to play around with a toy lathe at home no need to ask anyone here for permission. Just my 2 cents.

 

[john.k]

I know two people with small lathes in their back room making small brass parts for sale ....one makes small steam boiler feed injectors for model locos ,the other one makes carby bits for antique engines .......prices are astronomical,but people pay for what they want or need .

 

[implmex]

Good morning All:
I have a laser welder.
I also have a full-on prototyping shop that I've run for decades.

I mention the laser welder for a bunch of reasons.
When I imagine myself in the OP's shoes, the welder is attractive because:
1) Almost nobody has one so there's not a lot of competition.

2) It's small, clean, quiet, stand-alone, single phase 220V etc etc.
Not even a fussy girlfriend would object to having one in the living room.
The hardest part is lugging in an argon bottle twice a year.

3) Once you find out how to price your work it can be lucrative...I have jobs I run from time to time that net me several hundred dollars per hour, and I can sit in comfort and splendour while I do stuff that no other shop can take on.

4) The workpieces are all small...no cranes, no hoists, no thousand pound pallets of material.
You can just put them in your pocket and walk them into your apartment, and no one needs to know.

5) The workpieces are all pretty simple so they don't take long...you can do a project in an evening and walk away with several hundred bucks of easy money.
They come to you because there's no one else who has the gadget (unlike say, a CNC mill or lathe).

So as an apartment type side business in the manufacturing domain, it has a lot to recommend it.
Having said that, the laser welder was by far the worst ROI of any of the toys in my shop, but I resurrected a wreck for cheap and ended up doing OK with it.

I was doing the wrong work on it, but once I got into micro fabrication, my profitability just soared.
Repairing injection molds and fixing people's busted eye glasses for twenty bucks a pop was not it!
Welding together micro plasma nozzles for a local company was!
So was welding optical parts together for another company.

If I had just the laser welder I could probably do OK with it as a retirement gig, even if I had to give up all my other gadgets.
But crucially I have the connections now...I've been in this gig for over twenty years.
If the OP wants to do it too, he has to build up the connections just like I had to.

Cheers

Marcus
www.implant-mechanix.com
www.vancouverwireedm.com

 

[john.k]

They promised me overnight success ......but Im young and I cant wait that long!

 

[Gage Johnson]

They promised me overnight success ......but Im young and I cant wait that long!

I don't understand; what do you mean?

 

[magneticanomaly]

I started my business with SB 10 and bench grinder in a bedroom, bandsaw and drill-press in the kitchen, welders and later, milling machine in a shed attached to the house.
In my experience, there are few repair and can't-buy-this-part jobs that can be done on a lathe alone. You will not be competitive on production jobs with a manual lathe (unless turret lathe).
But repair work is IMO the ideal complement to engineering education, because you get to see how things fail in the real world.

 

[Cole2534]

This is a silly idea to be honest, I'm not saying it won't work - it's just very optimistic. With that said, You're 23 years old; go after it brother. You literally have nothing to lose.

Engineering school is tough, BTDT. What he has to lose is a GPA and what goes with it by tinkering around in his apartment.

Nothing wrong with getting a job during school, just wouldn't want to balance a full fledged business and a full engineering school schedule.

 

[Freedommachine]

Engineering school is tough, BTDT. What he has to lose is a GPA and what goes with it by tinkering around in his apartment.

Nothing wrong with getting a job during school, just wouldn't want to balance a full fledged business and a full engineering school schedule.

Sure, but isn't that a matter of priorities?

No one is going to build a full machine shop in an apartment, I assume the OP knows that. However, "practice makes better" so I really don't see any harm in encouraging someone's ambitions unless their idea is bad and involves considerable debt.

Acquiring machine tools is easy, even for people without access to capital. Developing a vision for a business; learning how to establish a good, functional legal entity; and overcoming the fear of approaching customers is the part most people get hung up on.

I'm 3 years in and still learning things I didn't know. If the OP is willing to get a head start on that while he's still in school, it's a smart move.