Epoxy Granite Mini Lathe Upgrade 

There’s a company that makes an epoxy granite product specifically for this purpose, filling machine castings. The company is DIAMANT polymer. They are based in Germany, but there is a distributor near me in the states, might be one near you as well. Also, I really enjoy seeing how much you are able to do with limited and small tools. You make the most out of everything at your disposal and that’s just awesome to see, especially in this day and age where we are often so spoiled and take too many things for granted.

If you want a cheaper, easier and overall better solution to the problem, just take a prefferably polished granite curb (I've used 120x20x8 cm or something like that), drill it, put it under the lathe and bolt the two together. 38 kg of solid granite really does the job.

I added epoxy "granite" to my Sieg X3 mill and my Toolex drill press. Definitely an improvement and reasonably easy to do. I used a mix of sand and gravel chips and as you've found out there is ton of conflicting information out there on possible combinations of materials. Marine chandlers sell good epoxies.

I've seen a few German machine tools that were deliberately designed from the ground up using epoxy granite. They took most of the vibration out and do a nice job machining parts.

Love seeing all your little upgrades, doo-dads, and tool mods anytime and throughout. It's what precision machining is all about. Carry on!

Hey dude great to see you still pushing this lathe to it’s limits and the ideas you come up with for improving the lathe are great. Keep up the good work speak soon.

Thanks for sharing and im sure for those who share after you. Your one of the reasons I got a mini lathe in the first place! Cheers!

Spectacular! Great job,I did pour concrete in a Rong Fu mill column years ago,did help for vibration ,but was messy job I love you idea ! Congrats and thanks a lot for your videos !👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👍👍👍👍👍

I'd be tempted to do a pure epoxy pour over top of that grit filled surface. Over time you will get some grit coming out and it could abrade your ways.

Great video! I have been watching lots of videos on epoxy granite and this one is the best! Thanks!

Really cool! I have this on my list of things to do on my Mini Lathe too :) Interesting to see how you did it. Thanks for sharing this!

Gday, anything added is a bonus, it’s a good thing your prepared to give this a go and see if it does work or not and share the findings, great job mate, cheers

I have a small mill/lathe combo, and find fixing a 15 lb weight (chunk of railroad track) on the far side of the cross slide works very well. Great video.

When listening to the video, I KNOW you're saying "epoxy granite", but I keep hearing it like "places that can be filled with poxy granite", and it makes the video more fun :)

Nice upgrade, thanks for sharing

Thank you for the video! I was wondering about the same - how to improve rigidity, add mass and maybe dampen vibrations a little. I went a different route and poured myself a 70 kg concrete slab and bolted the lathe to it. Totally worth it.

Beautiful small lathe & I like your work

Great Solution for this Tiny Lathe

I used #8 lead birdshot and epoxy for a milling machine base. Good results. ( But expensive ). My mini lathe is bolted to a granite slab, about 2 inches thick. It had to be ground / scraped at the feet to work. That was very effective.

Using lead shot for shotgun shells is also a great option.

Cut up tires would work too,, I would think,, pry them in, fill the gaps with silicone. 1st time watching. My thoughts are on a lathe that small positive rake carbide brazed tools 😂would help also. Thanks . ( my bad after watching more videos… those were positive rake, and those issues were addressed….good stuff Maynard)

Yup, we agree on the practicality of this. Great video. Thank you //ji

Love that ratcheting tap holder.

Put the bed upside down on a mill and cut the bottoms of the feet flat. Get a length of U channel iron and clamp it open side up on the mill. Make sure it doesn't rock before clamping so it won't be twisted. Mill the edges flat. Flip it over and mill the flat side. Now you have a heavy, rigid piece to bolt the lathe bed to. It'll form a box with the bed to resist twist and bending. I used to have two of these 7" lathes and they were not very stiff. I could mount a test indicator to the carriage, put it onto a piece in the chuck and pushing on the headstock with one finger would cause enough deflection for the indicator to show. For mounting to a bench tabs could be welded to the U channel prior to any of the milling. Or mill the outer sides flat and drill holes to bolt lengths of angle iron to the U channel. I didn't do the U channel mod because at the time my mill was a Harbor Freight 12 speed drill-mill AKA "Big Red". I did manage to mill the bottoms of the feet the same amount with some careful repositioning and quite a lot of other modifications got applied.

Great videos!

If you have any granite shops nearby, you could try to get a sink cutout for a base. The common kitchen sink in America is 28×16", I used a 30×12" piece for mine, it could be as short as 21.5" from foot to foot. We usually throw sink cutouts in trash, if the guys are cool they will give it to you for free.

You can increase the packing density by using multiple sizes of filler. Using 3 sizes (large, medium, and fine) is good enough for most purposes, but the relative sizes and proportions matter.

I used the same drill press motor to made an alloy wheel polisher it's suprisingly good

That wheel came out great.

Half way through - An amazing amount of work you are willing to expend. //ji

Great work mate! You are really inspiring me to get back out into my shed and finish off a few projects...! Helpful formula for you, natural frequency is proportional to the square root of the stiffness over the mass. So if you increase the stiffness the same amount that you increase the mass, it might not do much... But if you increase the mass a LOT, then the stiffness isn't as much of an issue. However, you'll still get the same amount of deflection when you are cutting. (Sigh, no free lunch hey?) Anyway, keep on doing thus stuff, as it's really useful for all of us! Cheers mate 😁

intention to inform. I made a pure wooden table for a 80kg SChaublin102 lathe. That dint workout at all. The wood is bouncing up the vibrations. It swings within so to say. I changed to a steelframe and the swinging is gone. Its as simple as it gets as heavier the table is the better is the vibration dampening. I have also a Schaublin 102vm with a 400kg castiron table or sockel. there is almost no vibration unless the cutting parameters are unbalanced. Screw your lathe table to the floor so max rigididy is gained. Is written in the manual btw. ^^ like your clips gained much from them. Thy keep em coming =)

Interesting, I have been planing on doing something very similar on my mini lathe and mini mill. Time will tell. But this is not a bad upgrade.

Just a thought for next time, you can easily use larger granite aggregate generally, and pour the sandblasting media in after, much like concrete.

Interesting project - thanks :)

Thanks for the honest review! I have to say I’m not a fan making it so the chips can’t pass through. Why not stay in the direction you went with when adding the enlarged feet and couple the lathe to an inertia base? - -Cast up a 6” thick slab and couple it to the lathe bed. -This should help pull out some resonance and be somewhat easy to reverse when moving equipment if needed you can also get it to significantly heavier than what you can fit inside the machine. -Finally, coupling the two sides of the machine should help increase its torsional rigidity - something your blend of epoxy granite wasn’t designed to do.

I've been considering doing this to fill in the voids in the frame of a 14" Reliant Bandsaw (Delta clone) to increase rigidity for better cuts and mass to soak up vibration. I was thinking of using concrete as a filler, but after your vid, I think epoxy with a filler material might be a better idea. Had you considered using cast iron grindings from brake drums and rotors? You can get as much as you want from an auto repair shop for free. I checked the weight and cast iron grindings are about 125 pounds to cubic foot and aluminum oxide, depending on grade, runs from 60 to 120 pounds. On my band saw I would cut holes 3/4 - 1 inch in each of the webbing in the frame to allow the epoxy to cure as one big piece in the hope of picking up some rigidity in addition to mass.

Thumbs up for the resin comparison! Polyester sure has a very messy smell, but it also shrinks noticeably. Like 5 to 10%. Epoxy still is in the 3-5% range I think. PUR is best with ~1%.

Thank you useful 👍

Clear epoxy and 7 1\2" lead shot is easy to mix up and looks cool too. But will have a lot of weight. After everything is set you can drill holes for coolant drains

When I needed to add weight and vibration dampening to my anvil stand, I used lead BB's (bird shot) to fill up a large void in the stand. It worked like a champ. Now the void I filled was totally sealed afterword so there is no chance at all of any of the lead or lead dust getting getting out of the containment space. Completely encapsulating the lead shot in epoxy resin should also serve to prevent lead dust generation as long as there is no chance of routinely abrading or otherwise damaging the epoxy/lead matrix. Keep in mind that lead is toxic and lead poisoning is a thing. You must be very careful and safety minded any time you work with, or around, lead to counter potential exposure risk.

Thanks.. I have a 900mm table top mini lathe that need a lot of upgrades. I think that you could have used granite with the garnet and tried adding food grade silicon dioxide to the resin mix to lower the percent of actual resin and make a more stone like fill. I am on a wood table and am thinking of making a additional base out of 25-10mm metal with a fill to add dampening.

I mounted my 10x24 on a 2 inch slab of concrete and filled her up with sand/epoxy. definitely made the machine have better finishes and less chatter.

Thanks for the explanations and summary. Will spent time and money otherwise :-) Weekend Stuff

Good video

In terms of motor mounting - I'd personally add some rubber spacers to the mounts (between the motor and the mounting plate, and also under the bolt heads). Rigid mounting the motor without any dampening will let vibration transfer between the motor and lathe - If you add a soft medium between them, you'll see far less vibration being transferred into the cut As for the epoxy, that's a great idea. I've toyed with the idea of making an epoxy granite bed for my little '6040' CNC for a while but finally settled on a thick aluminium plate instead - Though I may add some mass to the underside, it depends on the space I have. I was going to use aluminium oxide ('blasting grit') just because I can get some from my work for free lol I'd suggest casting an epoxy granite / concrete slab for under the lathe if you wanted to take it a step further -Obviously there's only so far you can take these little machines but any little helps

Great content. I kinda like the iron of saying the paint doesn't stick to well to the casting and then being unable to remove it 😅 based on the location I bet the paint there had absorbed a heap of gease and oils over time and meant the paint stripper was just unable to cut into the paint as the grease... if that was the case, no amount of 'quick' (relative term) cleaning and using a degraser to get the surface grime off would have helped! Great vid again, and thanks for doing the experiment!

I am on my 2nd one of those drill presses. Had to return my first because the motor started smoking and lost power after 30 minutes of use. Only drilled about 10 holes. May have been a dud but haven’t used the replacement as yet. Good job as always

Neat idea. If you go this route on your mill I would consider electrolysis to remove the paint. I have rebuilt a couple of machines and that takes you back to bare metal with almost zero elbow grease.

I stopped fighting my mini lathe and just bought a 10x22. now I can focus on the work and not the machine.

Good job. Ive been doing epoxy granite for many years and its always been a worthy addition. It does come down to the quality of your mix. You could’ve used some larger pebbles and quartz, probably some other content. Using just sand will leave it heavy and flexible.

This is a neat trick for mass-loading equipment. I can see this being helpful for many different machine types. 14:13-14:31 full volume on the cut makes the voiceover hard to understand.

Thank you for experimenting and sharing the hard-earned knowledge. How's the chip evacuation now?

Thank you - this was interesting. I noticed one tidbit towards the end about mounting/stabilizing. What were the dimensions of the steel plates you used to mount on your benchtop? Are the screws countersunk? Thanks - this is what I guess I have been moving towards for my current issue.

@04:05 Sand blasting would have been a LOT better, to get a surface that will epoxy to stick to it. You can get a hand held sand blaster for 30 dollars.

The trick I figured out for using paint stripper is to thoroughly degrease painted surface. Grease, oils and wax, no matter how thin, is a paint stripper barrier.

I feel like brake lathe dust from your local auto repair might make an excellent medium for filling like this mixed into the epoxy. It would be nearly as good as just filling the voids with cast iron. As always, thank you for sharing your projects with us. 🙂

Great video! 👍 And congrats on using the sandblasting garnet as the filler, I had really great results with epoxy-garnet and was one of the first guys to popularise that composite on the CNC forums about 12 or 13 years ago. Actually I think I was the first guy to try garnet. To my taste you had the mix way too dry, it should be wet enough to flow (although slowly) not be like molding sand where you can tamp it into a shape. If anything I prefer to mix it too wet, and let the garnet settle with a lot of vibrating and the epoxy will sit on top to be skimmed off. You can actually get a tighter pack with more total garnet percentage compared to a dryer mix, I know that sounds opposite but the wet mix allows the garnet to sink to the bottom and really interlock the garnet crystals tightly.

Wheel weights are still available for here for free. I've used several hundred pounds for vibration dampening mass over the years and wonder whether suspended in a sand/epoxy mix they might not serve very well in this application. The mass is certainly there.

I saw one video, someone was making a CNC machine from scratch, and they used granite gravel, I wondered if you could combine granite gravel with granite powder in the epoxy mix. A few days ago I had the chance to use a BIG Harrison lathe, 4 inch spindle through hole and bolted to a concrete floor, an interesting comparison to a hobby lathe - I won't knock what hobby lathes are, they have to be built to a price and I understand that, but jezz, turning a big casting ( a foot dia) at 400 rpm with ease...

Not sure how easy it would be to find, but im curious how well mixing lead shot into the mix would work, it would definitely up the weight by a decent amount at the very least.

I've been wondering about epoxy granite lately and thought "why not just use cast iron pieces?" it's heavier than any rock, relatively cheap and easy to get and from the chart you've shown it should be better at absorbing vibrations than sand or what you've used. Also noticed that lead alloys have even better loss coefficient so perhaps filling it with lead pellets would work even better.

Awesome video could you do a nuther one on how u did the new motor set up

You should buy the next size up machine class and start anew series of upgrading it. I'm certain you could get most places to sponsor the stuff too.

Nice lathe. I've removed paint from low cost Chinese machines and found a generous layer of factory fitted rust underneath.

I knew you would do this mod one day.

I wonder if lead shot would be a good fill material considering it's quite dense and you can buy it in fine pellet form.

You had me at "it's relatively inexpensive"

There is an old Irish joke, lost tourists ask for directions. A local says well, to get there I wouldn't start from here! My first lathe was a Hardinge HLV it's 60 years old super accurate, top quality machine. It makes me a better machinist, never had any chatter. Also cost the Same as a mini lathe. Everyday I work on it I feel honoured.

Probably could have added lead shot like bird shot which would have given you some added weight. Great job loved the video.

Make a concrete table top about 50mm thick then anchor the lathe to it. This will add additional mass and stiffening. Careful that you make the surface as flat as possible, or be prepared to shim to remove any bed twist.

I'm surprised you didn't get a sewing machine servo motor.

Interesting. I like the comment about mounting the machine to a slab of granite from a countertop vendor. I finally made larger diameter brass nuts for my QC tool holders. I need to pony up and get the mill.

dumb question, how about using led pellets instead of garnet or granite? not sure about the dampening vibrations part but it would definitely add a lot more mass. also, as you mentioned, i think the biggest improvement would be to change the wood table for a steel mounted frame, or even concrete

If you don't already have a lathe take a moment to consider the upgrades needed to bring this one up to snuff. Your conclusion has to be to save yourself a lot of time and money by getting a bigger better lathe in the first place. Don't get me wrong ,all of the mini lathe upgrade videos on YT are helpful, clever and doable but it's a lot less bother if you don't have to bother.

I'm planning on doing it as well but use the same method that granitan do witch is they use 3 different size of media in there epoxy granite ( the do the epoxy granite for studer grinders and meany other grinders that have a epoxy granite base)

you could always bolt it down to a steel slab or granite slab for extra mass

Garnet was a great choice. It's sharp and heavier than granite, and harder too. Some epoxy cures softer, and some harder but it's hard to know without trying a sample. Since it's a small cavity, I thought of just pouring it full of molten lead, which should be better in some ways.

Very interesting, would you be able to post the link for those charts regarding vibration assorbing materials? Cheers

I was surprised how much using a link belt helped my milling machine out when it came to surface finishes. I wouldn't think a link belt would run smoother than a plain V belt does but somehow they do. Link belts look so cool too. Once you get into them they're addictive. So be warned about that. You'll want to put link belts on everything.

I considering build a concrete bench for my lathe, as you trim it accordingly with proper bolt and adhesive epoxy you should get better result, theres no significant mass to dump, the cast itself is kinda of massless

I think a more dense base rather than mounted to a wooden top table would be best, maybe a large pillar of concrete it can bolt to, this way there is way more mass for it to push the vibrations to that would dampen it...usually big lathes are bolted down to a huge thick concrete slab...or weigh tons rather than pounds

One more thing you can do is to bolt it down to a piece of granite. I went to a granite supplier and got a small piece large enough for the mini lathe (gave it to me for free) and it was definitely worth it. Great job as always.

interesting upgrade, I think I would have added cast lead bars before the epoxy to add as much density as possible, but then I do have access to a reasonable amount of the stuff. Thanks for sharing

Why not use cement/concrete? Thanks for the video!

Лучший материал для заполнения - безусадочный бетон с фиброй. Коэффициэнт расширения у него такой же, как у стали и чугуна. Прочность - 600 единиц. Эпоксидная смола усаживается при полимеризации.

Cover your paint stripper with plastic and let it sit, the plastic traps the Esther’s that act on the paint and greatly improves efficacy.

Surely to dampen a lathe of vibrations start by bolting it down on a rigid steel bench bolted to a concrete floor with ajustment to level it, you don't get lathe manufacturers sell lathes with wooden stands, also filling the voids you stop the swarf it will build up on top,🇬🇧👍

If your purpose is to dampen vibration, then loose sand is a few orders of magnitude better than a cured, stiff block of anything, even solid/foamed rubber. What is better is going to be loose iron dust. If you want more rigidity, polyester polymer granite is an equivalent option for 1/3 the cost.

....Concrete, let dry and shrink then when bone dry add epoxy that will soak into the now dry concrete, fill the shrink-gaps and glue it to the casting................ Precast concrete tiles are dirt-cheap and at 50mm or thicker they make great machine bases combined with garage-floor epoxy to coat and seal them....

Could you post a link to the paper you referenced at 9:40 ? Looks like a good read.

It seems to me that #8 or #12 lead shot would have been a good choice to mix with the epoxy.

Am suprised you didn't flow a bit of neat epoxy onto the fill once it had started to tack off to get a nice easy cleaning smooth surface.

Given the cheapness, availability, coefficient of expansion, temperature stability and density of granite aggregate concrete (portland cement type) and the ease with which a mix of fine and medium aggregates can be mixed and "flowed", I'm surprised that a lot more use is not made of concrete in the workshop. This is especially true for DIY projects such as lathe mounts, lathe bases, CNC bases and gantries, mill mounts, bases and actual bodies. Concrete is easy and cheap to produce and mould, can be polished and ground to fine tolerances with a good grinder and is EXCELLENT at damping vibrations through pure density alone, not to mention its internal structure. Is epoxy concrete SO much better to justify the extra expense of the resin over cement and water?

As a general rule don't make more than one modification at a time, otherwise you don't know what has made it better (or worse!).

Increasing the mass of the lathe bed will reduce chatter. Epoxy lead shot would have been really heavy. Bolting the bed to a heavy steel beam would stiffen it even more.

You could always use a combination of course(granite) and fine aggregate (garnet)

Once you bond the sand in the epoxy, it behaves very differently than loose sand in a cavity which is really what those tables refer to.. The benefit of urethane resin is that it is more elastic than an epoxy and would therefore have better damping coefficient. Another alternative is polyester resin (ie car body/fiberglass resin) which is not as elastic as polyurethane, but better than epoxy...

How do you go with cleaning out the chips from between the ways, now that they are filled with the EG. Do the chips build up ?

I would have been tempted to look for some barite sand (i.e. barium sulfate). They use this to add weight to the mud used for oil well drilling. They also use it to fill the sandbags used in bench rest rifle shooting. Heavy stuff: the mineral barite. If barite proved too expensive, I would have put #4 lead buckshot in the epoxy.