7 replies to this topic

[The Matt]

I'm trying to put some costs together for some machinery and I need to buy a lathe (or a CNC lathe if costs allow) amongst other things.  I'm struggling with my memory and machineshop terminology.

 

I want the sort of lathe where you can feed bar in through the back of the chuck, machine it, then part it off, then keep feeding the bar stock in to repeat the work piece.  Make sense?  I know I'll need to support the bar with as it's turning too (bar feed system???)?

 

Is this called a hollow chuck lathe?  Is this a feature that's available on most lathes?  I seem to remember one at college that had a specific type of open/hollow chuck specifically for this purpose.  But college was a LONG time ago.  I've probably not even used a lathe for 15 years.

I need to turn some very simple internally threaded bosses from 1" stainless steel bar.  I say "I need to turn..." It won't be me doing the machining personally.  I just need to buy the lathe!

 

[The Matt]

Like this kind of thing:

 

[rally515]

Hi Matt, I honestly should be able to tell you this but I'm struggling also.

 

I operate a Colchester Lathe everyday and I can't say we have a Lathe without the tapered throat you mention, we've always referred to it as "the throat" but I can't say to my knowledge there is a common spoken terms for it  .

[The Matt]

I wonder if you can convert a lot of lathes to take bar fed in through the back anyway, so maybe I'm looking for something that isn't really a feature as it's on all of them???

[Ethel]

Yep, throat is maximum diameter you can feed through the chuck. I suppose centre lathe would describe it, any that don't have a hollow centre would be rare specialist beasties. If you're looking at small scale batch production fed through the throat a capstan lathe may be the way to go.

[The Matt]

Initially small- scale. Ramping up to about 3000 bosses per week at most (still small scale in real terms).

But I want to be able to take on contract machining too.

[rally515]

A CNC Lathe would be so much better for what you need if you can stretch to it long term by the sounds of things, just being able to run a 1 off through manually and have the Lathe learn it as you go would defiantly take a lot of the time out of machining on a conventional Lathe. Which obviously would ramp up production considerably.

 

There are quite a lot of ex-college machinery and liquidation stock of industrial Lathes and CNC's on E-bay recently, my old college for example had a lot and after it shut down it's all recently appeared at reasonable prices from a company that obviously profits from the deal.

 

If you could find an old turning machine that's been stood for a long time that might tide you over for quite a while if you already have a machinist and tooling/ measuring equipment.

That way you could save a lot longer for what going to be best at the job whilst still taking on the work in the mean time.

Maybe something like an old collet chuck machine ?

[The Matt]

http://pages.ebay.co...2794838&alt=web

This kind of thing looks like what I'd need?