Homemade lathe from motorcycle parts

[elf]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-As4tECwcQ

Shows what you can do with little.

p.s
Agents of OSHA should not watch.

[Paul Alciatore]

Very clever man. He built a grown up Unimat.

[Rosco-P]

Another Darwin Award candidate, smelting and pouring molten metal in shorts and sandals.

[JoeLee]

I want to see someone make one out of a potato peeler.

JL................

[Alistair Hosie]

The secret, after myself having done many castings Dental castings, Using the lost wax method of course but even here without the lost wax the secret is in the preparation( and not pouring with bare feet) sorry couldn't resist that. Just plain madness really .
If you get the mould carefully made taking a bit more time, so as to remove a lot of the excess metal being cast, which will eventually need to be removed after casting, which makes little sense to me sorry. Get the initial mould as near as perfect *IF YOU CAN* ,of course to the end shape required. And save yourself a lot of unnecessary metal removal. Otherwise good idea to use scrap aluminium. .Now where did that patient run off to the one with the aluminium teeth. LOL Alistair

[flylo]

I'm sure most of you know about the small lathe made by prisoners in a WWII Japanese POW camp http://machineshop.olin.edu/resource...mp%20Lathe.pdf

[Rosco-P]

I'm sure most of you know about the small lathe made by prisoners in a WWII Japanese POW camp http://machineshop.olin.edu/resource...mp%20Lathe.pdf

That's a scan of pages from the Machinist's Bedside Reader.

[PStechPaul]

I had not seen that before. Very interesting! I noticed that page 159 was missing.

There was also a lathe (and other machine tools) made using concrete and scrap parts from cars and other things:

https://www.engineeringforchange.org/the-concrete-lathe-world-war-i-technology-meets-21st-century-design/

http://www.slideshare.net/epolitics/building-the-concrete-lathe-open-source-machine-tools

[Norman Bain]

I am impressed he got as much of it going as well as he did. Being prepared to design then weld all those bits together to make gearboxes etc etc was impressive. Some of us with better kit to do the works with should be humbled.

Cheers,
Norman

[flylo]

That's a scan of pages from the Machinist's Bedside Reader.

It's a story all over the net. Her's an article about the camp, the radio & generator the made the lathe & soldering iron to build. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batu_Lintang_camp

[sasquatch]

Thanks for the very interesting read Flylo! Offsets the negative comments!

[loose nut]

As the old saying goes "you get what you pay for" and he didn't pay much.

Nothing wrong with building your own tools but there are better and more accurate ways to do it. The homemade drill press worked well enough.

[Jimmer12]

I'm not exactly sure what he accomplished by casting a ring and then turning it to a geometric shape. I would have been impressed if he casted something to an actual unique shape.

[Magicniner]

I'm not exactly sure what he accomplished by casting a ring and then turning it to a geometric shape.

I think he simply obtained a piece of stock from which he could machine the part he wanted, that's a big lump of plate or bar if you're somewhere without much money or a local metals stockist ;-)

- Nick

[Forrest Addy]

My hat's off to the guy. As a machine tool it has obvious deficiencies but as a scratch built machine tool built on the cheap with limited resources it's quite an accomplishment. Machinists 150 years ago built the working parts of the Industrial Revolution using machine tools not much better.

While this home built machine tool may not compete in productivity with a factory built machine I'm quite sure a capable fellow working with care can make any part within its work envelope that does nor require turned screw threads, and, truly cylindrical or flat features may be a real challenge for its axis geometry.

An unthinking person may belittle this endeavor and make disparaging comparisons but the fact remains: it is a lathe/milling machine with limited utility built by an individual of no small talent and remarkable determination. I'm sure none of the scoffers and sneerers have ever scratch-built anything 1/10 the complexity and utillity of the targer of their scorn and worked it through to completion: sour grapes redeux