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.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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 !👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👍👍👍👍👍

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.

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!

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!

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

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 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.

Nice upgrade, thanks for sharing

Beautiful small lathe & I like your work

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.

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)

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.

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.

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

Love that ratcheting tap holder.

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 :)

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

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 😁

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.

Great videos!

Great Solution for this Tiny Lathe

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.

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 :)

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

That wheel came out great.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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 =)

Thank you useful 👍

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

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

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

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.

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...

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

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.

Good video

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Would casting lead into the voids of the bed, or fine lead shot or power mixed with the epoxy be a viable choice? Genuinely curious.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 knew you would do this mod one day.

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.

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

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 just thinking about this, surely the lathe if bolted to a FLAT rigid surface will secure it and the vibration could mostly come from the way clearances?????

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

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

Instead of using epoxy, could you use a liquid rubber mix which surely would help with dampening?

Would it not be easier to bolt it to a large piece of metal beam like an I bar?

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.

Great work! What about using the intermediate pulley from the drill press to increase the available speed range?

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.

I know, eopxy granite is the best, but it's relative expensive. I wanted to play with fiberglass reinforced concrete (with some extra additives). Is it that much worse?

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.

You had me at "it's relatively inexpensive"

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)

@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.

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

Was melting lead into the cavity not an option? Better loss coefficient AND more mass than any epoxy composite.

When you filled the bed, how do you get access to support longer parts with the endstock and the glasses (?) (Bril in Dutch) ? Although it is a lot of fumbling I use those openings for adding/moving those supports on my lathe. Are there other ways to do this that I oversee?

Does anybody know if anyone has tried pouring lead into these voids? Seems like that would definitely increase the mass and I think it would dampen vibration, especially if you used soft lead.

Браво за смелия опит. Следващия път, ако има такъв, пробвай с олово - лесно се топи много тежи и е меко - поглъща вибрациите добре но е скъпо.

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.

I jut found your channel and wa wondering.... what i that accordian looking cover you have made of. do you have the pec on it.... I am trying to go through your ch but figured I would ask.

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.

It's kinda late, but, have you looked into a South Bend 9A. I have chatter also but not so bad That I can't work around it. Also I have a 1hp 3ph with a ABB VFD

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.

EAR Composites (now owned by 3M) makes a line of vibration dampening urethanes that is shocking how well they work. Not sure if they make a castable version though.

out of curiosity; did you use a degreaser on the part before paint stripper? I wonder if there was a coating of oil acting like a buffer

Looking at that chart.... What about filling it with lead?

Had you considered simple bag concrete? You could even change the included mixed generic rocks with granite pebbles if they weren't already granite if you had wanted to.