New Mini Lathe Turning S2 Tool Steel with Carbide  

Thanks for the kind words! The new handle I was turning here works great! Tapered it on the first 1/3rd and threaded the tip, chamfered the 90’s and buffed it up pretty. :) Ya I’m totally loving it so far. Bought it used off a guy for cheap with a bunch of tooling he threw in. I tore down the entire machine (twice) and greased/lubed/ tightened/straightened and optimized every single point. Added some Mail-spec bearing oil into the sealed spindle bearings, greased and set all headstock gear lash and gear change side as well. By far the biggest rigidity differences were made by diamond honing all the slide surfaces (especially the bottom rails) & trueing-up all gib spacers, and then precisely adjusting all gibs rod nut angles to remove backlash. Then mounted it all to a 25” x 1/4” steel channel. Immediately noticed a huge upgrade in rigidity and surface finish. I also trued up the 3 jaw chuck via dial indicator and got it to less than 0.0015” of runout which is pretty good. Next I’m going to replace the 3” chuck with a 5” or possibly 4” and adapter backplate. I’m sure I could learn a lot from you and all your valuable experience on the larger lathes! Thanks for the comments and I hope you enjoy your new mini to mess with inside. That’s a good idea to be honest! 👍

Well your new mini lathe looks quite good, and works well. I bought my first lathe for use at home in 1990, and have had much larger lathes at home since 1992. But just lately I decided to downsize some of my machines so I bought one of these mini lathes for use in the house where it sits in the living room so I can fiddle with something mechanical when I'm stuck indoors and cannot escape to the workshop, I've had it for less than a week. I remember when they first appeared here in the UK, over 25 years ago I think. Chester Machine Tools were the first to offer them here, and they were more expensive back then than they are now, even though prices have risen in the last 4 years. Thankfully China are still making them. Anyway, I hope your new lathe gives you many years of good service, or at least until you decide to get yourself a larger one.

Btw, I’m currently scratching my head trying to find a softer aluminum oxide grinding wheel for sharpening HSS tooling than these grey ones. I’ve tried 3 different brands and all of them are too hard. They overheat the HSS in a matter of seconds, and I’m dunking every 5-7 seconds even. I constantly and diamond trueing them but they stop producing sparks and start just scuffing the HSS after about 20 seconds of use which I think is because they’re too hard. Trying to source a softer white wheel that will work for HSS is no easy feat here in Canada! The last HSS bit took me 2.5 hours to fully grind all angles on with 36 grit grey… :( Works amazing though!

Just got one of these lathes and am having issues with getting it to cut nicely on steel. How much of a difference did the U-channel upgrade make? Thinking of doing the same thing. Thanks!