Originally on Attila's workshop channel from Dec 2022
As someone who likes to keep his workshop clean and tidy I found that cleaning up the lathe after a turning session was particularly tedious. The ways and lead screw are always well lubricated and adding metal chips and shavings to the mix made this task longer than ideal, not to mention the aforementioned sludge gumming up the works and generally increasing the level of wear on the machine. Watching lots and lots of videos showed me the many ways others have tackled this problem, from simple rubber sheets to concertinas and spring steel lead screw covers, I just didn't like any of the solutions on offer. What I did like were the telescopic way covers from the big CNC machines so I decided to have a go and make my cover like this. The design is fairly straight forward and the only real area I had to think about more deeply was how to mount the bearers and what kind of wipers I could get hold of. I could have gone for a more compact design but this meant attaching the bearers with adhesive or double sided tape and I just didn't trust this to be oil and solvent resistant. So I went with the minimum thickness bearers that I could fix with screws, about five millimetres, and I'm still looking for wipers lol. It worked out OK and I have only lost about 27mm from the maximum size that can be turned with the cover in place. This should be good for 95 percent of the work that gets done on the lathe, the cover can be removed for any larger diameter turnings. The covers are made from 1.6mm sheet and the bearers are made from a nylon chopping board, this stuff is very durable.
So, does it work? Mostly, yes. The only two problems are one, small chips fell into the screw holes and then got trapped between the bearers and the cover, this was easily fixed by filling the screw holes with epoxy. The second problem is that the fixing method for the cover is via magnets, so when turning steel I expect these to get buried. But forget all that, it looks cool lol, and the action is very smooth.
See my main channel 'Attilas Workshop' here: / @attilasworkshop
21 авг 2024
