Re: Some properly old school heavy metal
 

My dad has worked in fabrication all his life and has loads of these stories. The one which makes my skin crawl is the large piece of swarf that fell off and got caught around the operator's ankle. When he walked away from the machine it tightened around his ankle - cigar cutter stylee!

Fab shops are nuts. I did a 3 week stint shot blasting at my dad's firm and even in that short time saw a steel box frame slip from a work bench onto a guys thumb, literally splitting it open on both sides! :o

Re: Some properly old school heavy metal
 

I miss my dads lathe and milling machine, went when he snuffed it and the house sold. Lathe was a colchester something and a bridgeport vertical miller.

As for using a piece of urine. Then again I did start an apprenticeship as a toolmaker and spent years driving lathes, milling machines, shapers, borers, surface grinders etc.

So imagine my surprise when I joined GEC and saw the big stuff they use for turbines and generators.

I keep looking for a decent bench size lathe, single phase, at least 24" between centres and able to swing about 6". Want to be able to offset the tailstock for taper turning and have both metric and imperial screw cutting gearing. Oh most important, as cheap as chips. Anyone help

Re: Some properly old school heavy metal
 

I was lucky enough to have a really good metalwork teacher at school who let us into the workshops in lunch breaks to fabricate stuff. I then went on to do an intensive apprenticeship (4 years crammed into 2 1/2) in Electrical Engineering before I joined the mob, which included 25% of my time at a local engineering training centre learning how to fabricate stuff by hand and on machines with a bit of sheet metalwork as well. You don't forget stuff like that because it's so useful in later life, it's about the most useful time I spent learning anywhere.

A small lathe like the one Tim describes would do me fine here for knocking up the sort of things Chris needs one for.

Re: Some properly old school heavy metal
 

This one I have is 4.5x24... gap bed so can turn some bigger pieces if they are short.

It has some of the set of changewheels with it to cut metric apparently from huge to 1mm pitch, would actually like smaller than that but we see what we can make with the gears here...
Problem is no table to tell you which is which, that'll be a laugh figuring out!!

Re: Some properly old school heavy metal
 

Oh jesus h christ! I feel sorry for your poor family and maria may well never see you again!


Watch those bloody fingers!

Re: Some properly old school heavy metal
 

I guess you don't pay the leccy bill?

Re: Some properly old school heavy metal
 

It's a smaller motor than the compressor!

Re: Some properly old school heavy metal
 

I thought this thread was about music.

Re: Some properly old school heavy metal
 

haha

That is a piece of old school metal, the motor looks about 60yr old

Re: Some properly old school heavy metal
 

Lol, not far off there, but fortunately we're well used to it, he's always been a garage hermit, if it's not lathes it's forks and carbs ;)


The pic just after they'd managed to get the thing down the drive... Pantrasher on the left looks like his eye's just popped out :D

http://a.imageshack.us/img28/1396/dscf2774k.jpg


Oh and JUST for you Chris babe ....








































Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee ah've gotta laaathe! :-D :-D :-D