Re: small hobby lathe: For Dave

Dave,

Just a few more things you might want to know about your lathe.

You will find that although the cross feed dial is marked in .oo1
increments it actually has a metric cross feed screw and the markings
will be slightly off. The more turns of the screw the greater the
degree of error that accumulates in referance to the dial.

Also when you put it on the surface table remove the top half of your
cross slide and take readings on it alone. You will probably find as
I did that the thing was stress releiving as they cut it. It appears
they didn't even do a rough machine process before they finished it.
I think you will find that the same process was done on the bottom
half. It looks like they just took ground blanks and started cutting.

I even went to the point of wedging ground pins of the same diameter
in the dovetails at both ends with adjustable parallels and then
setting it on parallels on the surface plate to see if the twist
followed the dovetails. It did to some extent but the reading were
different which brought me to the conclusion of the part stress
releiving as it was being machined. I came to the same conclusions
for the bottom half.

Just thought I would add this in to give you something to look for
when you do the same to yours.

Donald Brock

--- In CAD_CAM_EDM_DRO@y..., davemucha@j... wrote:
> Hi,
> Has anyone retrofitted a harbor freight hobby lathe?
> I'm waiting on this $400 toy, er, tool, and plan on
> setting it up for CNC.
>
> If anyone has some advice, warnings or hints, I'd
> really appreciate them.
>
> Dave