Tag Archives: lathe

Lathe Upgrades

Recently I’ve been working on a couple of upgrades to my old Craftsman (Atlas) 6 inch metal lathe. One thing I never bothered doing on the lathe was single point threading, because the lathe had manual change gears and I didn’t have a good enough reason to get into tearing down and setting up the […]

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Brass Nut

One of the members of the Midland Woodworkers has a tool with an adjusting nut that is too small to tighten successfully by hand. 5mm thread. I thought it might be a good lathe project. First I modeled it up in Fusion just for fun Then I got some brass and went to work. Here […]

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Lathe Control

The control for the VFD (Variable Frequency Drive) on my lathe was pretty shoddy, so I decided to build a new one. I got a 3 X 6 inch piece of 1/8 thick aluminum sheet from Hobby Metal Kits, and drilled and bored the holes for the switches and the potentiometer. The really cool part […]

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Lathe DRO Redux – Part 2

It’s finished!   I’ve completed the software, built the circuitry on protoboard, packaged it up and installed it. The software – since the Z axis used an iGaging scale and the X axis used a Harbor Freight caliper, I had to mash up two different Arudino sketches to deal with two different protocols, making sure […]

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