I've just been lathing around all day...
Spent the day on the lathe. I enjoy a good bit of lathing. All that precision and fiddling about with tiny tiny controls.
I have managed, by hand, to get my accuracy to within 0.009 of a millimetre. Which I'm rather proud of.
This is my lathe. Well, not MINE, the firm's.
With a piece of bronze in the chuck. It's a lovely machine - old, but solid. Red handle bottom left is the engage/disengage, brake - which makes the chuck spin or stop. All the handles and dials are for moving the tooling around. The blue thing is the tool. Pointy thing at the back, seen better bottom of the pic below, is the tail stock. knobs and handles for the gearing is all the things on the right. Weird towery-thingy at the back is the coolant run. You can see the coolant in the one below too.
And this is it with a piece of Ali, going full chat (it's not the fastest it will go, but it's the fastest this metal can take - 900 revs per min.
Both those pieces are for Heston Blumenthal - the internal workings of a food processor, made medieval.
And this is just because I happened to be using two welders on the same job, and it's not often I have them out together - but the piccy is a bit blurry and shit! Still, illustrates the difference ok.
Left one, red, is my TIG plant. Right one, grey, is my MIG plant. With all appropriate cables, lines and gas. The gas bottles look like they've had a bit of a tiff, actually, backs turned to each other...hmmm. As you can probably guess, TIG is a bit more complex than MIG, hence it having more dials, switches, leads etc.
I have managed, by hand, to get my accuracy to within 0.009 of a millimetre. Which I'm rather proud of.
This is my lathe. Well, not MINE, the firm's.
With a piece of bronze in the chuck. It's a lovely machine - old, but solid. Red handle bottom left is the engage/disengage, brake - which makes the chuck spin or stop. All the handles and dials are for moving the tooling around. The blue thing is the tool. Pointy thing at the back, seen better bottom of the pic below, is the tail stock. knobs and handles for the gearing is all the things on the right. Weird towery-thingy at the back is the coolant run. You can see the coolant in the one below too.
And this is it with a piece of Ali, going full chat (it's not the fastest it will go, but it's the fastest this metal can take - 900 revs per min.
Both those pieces are for Heston Blumenthal - the internal workings of a food processor, made medieval.
And this is just because I happened to be using two welders on the same job, and it's not often I have them out together - but the piccy is a bit blurry and shit! Still, illustrates the difference ok.
Left one, red, is my TIG plant. Right one, grey, is my MIG plant. With all appropriate cables, lines and gas. The gas bottles look like they've had a bit of a tiff, actually, backs turned to each other...hmmm. As you can probably guess, TIG is a bit more complex than MIG, hence it having more dials, switches, leads etc.