My bigger
machines
Compared to my watch tools, these are huge.
Above is a picture of my 13" South Bend
lathe. The bed ways are hardened so they were in great shape, but the rest of
ways were in bad shape. I hand scraped the rest them. I was able to get them to
about .0001" of flat and parallel. The first couple took a several days to do,
but after a while I got the hang of it and was able to them much faster. Below
are a couple of pictures of the ways I scraped. When I get some more motivation,
I will re-paint it. I built my own rotary phase converter to operate it from my
240V single phase feed.
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Here is my Bridgeport milling machine.
It's kind of a mess because I just finished a project when I took this picture.
I installed a GE variable frequency drive to operate it. The VFD is fed with
240V single phase and the output is 240V 3 phase. The drive cost $295. It's
cheaper than a phase converter and gives this step pulley mill, variable speed.
I found that at speeds less than 50% it will plug from forward to reverse.
Even nicer is at 8% speed the torque is so low, it will stall the motor before
breaking a 6/32 tap. The drive does
have breaking, I can stop rotation in .8 seconds. If I add breaking
resistors, I can stop and reverse direction in .4 seconds. For now, it works for
my needs.
At the right is a closer view of the
VFD. The lathe is just to the left of the mill. I have both of them in my two
car garage and can still fit in my car.
My smaller machine
Here is my home made CNC. I made it from plans by
John Kleinbauer. I am
still trying to figure out CNC programming.
