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Building a Small Lathe by L.C.Mason

The lathe has deservedly been called "The Prince of Machine Tools". It can carry out—or be adapted to carry out—almost every machining operation that can be imagined, as well as a good many normally looked on as purely hand operations. Its ability to do this is not very often fully exploited in a commercial machine shop, where special purpose machines can each do a strictly limited number of jobs rather more effectively. Economics enters the picture here, and a heavily built machine that can remove more metal in a given time on some machining operation represents a good investment from the point of view of a greater output of work in that time. These are not considerations that apply to the model engineer in the average home workshop. Time is generally of much less importance, and for reasons of cost if nothing else, the lathe is very often the only machine tool available. In these circumstances the lathe is frequently called upon to tackle a wide variety of machining jobs—some indeed, that could be better

carried out on a different sort of machine. Partly because of this, no doubt, it hi.s been said that the majority of jobs that the amateur's lathe is called on to deal with are too big for it. That "majority" is perhaps a little sweeping, but certainly many are. If the size of the average amateur's lathe is taken as up to 4j or 5 in. centre height, then it stands to reason that even more jobs must be too big for a really baby lathe. When we come to a lathe of the size presented here—1J in. centre height—then it might be thought that there can be few jobs that it can really cope with, and that all turning jobs are bordering on the "too big". This is very far from being the case, and a miniature lathe can put up an extremely good showing on a wide variety of jobs. A great deal of lathe work in general model engineering involves quite small components-+small shafts, bushes, glands, nuts, special screws and innumerable bits that the baby lathe can tackle, perhaps much better than a far bigger tool.

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