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transmission center shaft as spindle?

terramir

Plastic
Joined
Jun 7, 2014
Location
Los Angeles, CA USA
I have this shaft about 14" long that is one inch thick , except for a section towards the middle that is a little less and the ends have teeth to join with parts. I'm thinking this was from a ford transmission not sure which one thinking f150 e4od input shaft maybe
Now if I'm using a pulley system (think drill press speed system) and I would want to put it on the part of the shaft that is less diameter I would have to shim it so it would run true, but in the beginning I guess I would put a pulley on the rear where it has a true 1" diameter.

More interesting to me would be what bearings I should use, should I use roller bearings or bushings like maybe cast iron or bronze (oil-lite kinda things).Was thinking concrete or an i-beam for a base and two 3/8 flat stock for ways, albeit it won't be 3/8 by the time I mill and scrape the surfaces, although I would go real easy on that don't wanna lose too much mass.
I have seen people use cheap pillow blocks / like 4 of em for the head stock, But I would like to go more in the right direction there, what do "real" lathes use? cast iron bushings? roller bearings what would be the solid solution.
terramir
 
I have this shaft about 2 ft long that is one inch thick , except for a section towards the middle that is a little less and the ends have teeth to join with parts. I'm thinking this was from a ford transmission not sure which one thinking f150 e4od input shaft maybe
Now if I'm using a pulley system (think drill press speed system) and I would want to put it on the part of the shaft that is less diameter I would have to shim it so it would run true, but in the beginning I guess I would put a pulley on the rear where it has a true 1" diameter.

More interesting to me would be what bearings I should use, should I use roller bearings or bushings like maybe cast iron or bronze (oil-lite kinda things).Was thinking concrete or an i-beam for a base and two 3/8 flat stock for ways, albeit it won't be 3/8 by the time I mill and scrape the surfaces, although I would go real easy on that don't wanna lose too much mass.
I have seen people use cheap pillow blocks / like 4 of em for the head stock, But I would like to go more in the right direction there, what do "real" lathes use? cast iron bushings? roller bearings what would be the solid solution.
terramir

There are thousands of real lathes around, get one. If you don't even know what to use for bearings or that an old, f-it I am wasting my time, you are clearly an idiot.
 
Sounds like an engineering project, but oil lite bearings would not do well and other bearings likely need a take-up for end ways sloppyness. Plus to have any feed method of tool travel or threading would not be easy to make. Making a tall stock a big project. A chuck holding device in the end of spindle shaft another problem.

likely need a lathe, mill and surface grinder to accomplish this project.

Moonlight is right even a free give away lathe would be a better start to such a project.

Still good/great that you are thinking about design..all good ideas but you need to consider known/learn more machine building and work off what has been tried and work form that as where to start..
 
If you are building a wood lathe then I think oilite bearings/bushings would be fine. If you are trying to build a metal lathe then forget about it and do something else. Yes people have made metal lathes from scratch. I have seen one that was made in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during WW11 that was a jewel. However you can bet that the people who made it were very knowledgeable about how they work and were very skilled machinist to begin with. Evan a cheap import is going to be better then what you can cob together. I am not knocking your skill level. It's just physics.
 
And you are clearly an asshole, at the moment. You just had to pop off and elevate yourself at the expense of someone less god-like.

It was harsh, but really, it's not at all what the forum's intended for. It's even a little below the Home Shop forums (no offense, guys). Unless the OP is in a machine desert or skint he should just find himself a lathe. Even a green unmentionable is better than what he proposes.
 
You are entirely correct, of course. And your method of stating it is the perfect example of how one man should treat another who is a stranger and who has come with what he feels is a legitimate question.
 
It is practical..........many years ago /1975 ish,I made a number of small turning machines using the layshaft of a Warner T98 gearbox........it was ideal for the spindle ,1 1/2" hollow,large gear at front for a flange,two helicals left in the middle,a spur at the end for feed drive,and hardened all over .....quick grind ,and two hard journals for bronze shells. Used some of the gears from the box ,bed from two large dia hardchrome shafts from war surplus hydraulics.........In those days ,there were no cheap Chinese lathes ,and anything metalworking was gold.
 
Ok,
h8ers gonna hate, I understand this, as for the little green or red lathes(think harbor freight) they are insufficient for my purposes. I don't need quick cuts, but I need to keep the chatter to a mininmum. I understand that most bigger lathes are made out of cast iron specifically for this purpose, but space limitations are one of my biggest problems. I want a mini lathe (but one that actually can handle the materials needed, a gingery lathe is just as unsuited for my purpose. I don't need much travel, or swing for that matter. I asked this question to avoid the pitfalls other people have run into. there's this guy on youtube that built a lathe with an i-beam here YouTube.
Another guy YouTube with some metal angle iron and square tubes steel plates and some cheap shafting and pillow blocks he accomplished this with a drill press a hand drill and a welder rig.
He is even using a washing machine motor. he gets some severe chatter when turning steel, however the pillow blocks are probably not the only thing to blame but it's a trip on how he accomplished this.
I was asking a serious question in so far yes I know what bearings some lathes use, but I have never had access to really good ones.I could use abec-7 or 9 rated roller bearings, but I wanted some input because I do know that some larger machines use cast iron bearings hell some of those bushings are made on lathes in machine shops in the 1st place.

different lathes have different spindle and bearing mechanisms, I was wondering what options there are, because I know I am pretty sure I do not know everything so there might be methods I don't know about I could adapt for my purposes.
I have read Ginery's book and understand an aluminum lathe just doesn't have sufficient weight and deflection strength to make it much more than a toy, not to take away from his genius, what he did was quite amazing. I need to engineer something that can be the approximate size of a gingery lathe probably a bit smaller, but far stronger. I need to work on small stainless pieces for engineering purposes without having to cross town to a hacker space, and I cannot have the chatter these other machines exhibit. Besides that most hacker spaces I know have old lathes with 1-3 thou run-outs which will be far to big of a tolerance for these small engineering pieces. I wanted to weigh my options as well as decide what could be done as a 1st step second step/ upgrade etc. Because I'm guessing in order to get the best setup in the long run I'll have to use the lathe itself to bootstrap the upgrades.
Like some old machinists say if you have a lathe you can build every other tool in the shop, which in turn can help you upgrade your lathe.
I have some knowledge, but I am smart enough to know some knowledge can be dangerous, so I asked the question. maybe I should have led with those videos and said what can improve the head stock significantly from the get-go ? like different bearings cast iron bushings etc.
Now sorry this post is turning into a novel, but yeah anyone calling someone an idiot, with no clue who they are, fyi moonlight machine, I could join mensa as in clearly not an idiot, although I don't quite see the point joining a club of snobs. I just wanted more info as in upsides and downsides of different ways to creating a spindle so I can learn more than what's available in print, on this forum there must be like probably way more 10000 years of machining experience, and if there is one thing I have learned in my life it's that book smarts works sometimes quite well, but actual hands on experience is priceless.
terramir
 
I want a mini lathe (but one that actually can handle the materials needed, a gingery lathe is just as unsuited for my purpose. I don't need much travel, or swing for that matter.

Find a small horizontal mill, any vintage. LA basin has such. Several makes were BORN there.

It can also become a short-bed lathe of fairly decent swing for a small footprint, and lo and beHELD.. is also a mill.. which can also saw.. and even serve as a horizontal drillpress, too.

Cheating to grind, sand, sharpen, buff, or hone with such, but where there is motive power, there is ingenuity, so that has also been done by the desperate or disadvantaged.

You won't need to re-invent spindle nor bearings, and start-off already equipped with three axis table travel, a supporting over-arm preferably, and the possibility of adding at least a carpenter's router for vertical head.

Best part is that the "cubic footage" is vertically arranged, not horizontally, so on caster wheels, some take up no more floor footprint than a janitor's mop bucket, school water-fountain, or two sets of golf clubs.
 
If your goal is to make stainless steel parts and not merely to build your own lathe, I think you could make a mini lathe do the work you want far more easily than you could build a lathe from scratch.

After you construct your lathe, then you begin the real work of fitting and aligning all the parts, probably by hand scraping. Why not take a lathe already known to work and start right in with the fitting and aligning until you have a machine capable of meeting your specifications.

If your first time lathe design is a piece of absolute genius it will still require the same amount of scraping as a mini lathe to make it accurate. In the real world, working with materials and parts that were never intended to be a lathe, it's going to be a whole lot more scraping.

Every machine I've ever built had some unanticipated wrinkle and none of them were anywhere close to the complexity of a lathe.

I ordinarily assume things will take twice as long and cost twice as much anticipated. I would say if two of these systems have to work together, multiply the difficulty, so for times the sweat and gold. It continues to increase exponentially.
 
a s_ur_line lathe can do small stainless and exoctics without chatter, jewelers/watch makers do it everyday. A 3/8 flat bar has mass of next to zero. Using a beam could work, if you engineer were stiffeners go and use a thick flange weight; the really nice wood lathes made from fabricated steel use pipe, which has insane torsional stability compared to other shapes. Then they use saddles to hold bed.
at least jump up to 3/4 cold roll for ways, 3/8 is a noodle.
 
You wont be finding any T98s or T98a s for scrap nowdays.......they are out of early Inters ,and the last one I sold I got $400 for it..........Back in those days ,I bought a shed full of old gearboxes and diffs from A J Bush and Sons........who were famous in those days ,because they were "dry renderers"......in other words they turned offal /butchers waste into either fat or dry stock food.........and did the place stink?.....you better believe it....Bushes had a big fleet of Inters going back to the war...K5s,KB5s,and AL to Ab 160 s....all four tonners that picked up meat waste......anyhoo,I bought hundreds of gearboxes, diffs and engines off them,all the boxes were Warners /Borg Warners.......Did you know about 1956 ,Warners changed the direction of the helix on the T98 gears.......from LH to RH......dunno why,but it did cause confusion.
 
You wont be finding any T98s or T98a s for scrap nowdays.......they are out of early Inters ,and the last one I sold I got $400 for it.

I know that, was wondering more along the lines on how you did it, which is more interesting to me I have a shaft temporarily it can serve as the spindle it's hardened to all heck as well and as straight as can be. interested on how you build up a turning machines I get the re-using gears etc, also get using the bearings I was wondering how you built up a head stock and ways around that stuff you had.
terramir
 
If you want to build a lathe just for the sake of saying "I built it" that is understandable, if you want to make parts on a lathe, just buy one. I looked at the links you provided, it was painful, I don't see any of those being better than a HF mini. If you were in some remote 3rd world backwater, or ship wrecked on the Aland Islands, it might make sense to roll your own.

Quick look at LA CL shows several small lathes available in the $450 to $1500 range, break out the plastic, call a friend with a truck for help, and you can be making chips in a matter of days.
 








 
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