Yes--just add 1000.00 hours of hard labor-- and it is still an Underpowered laughable POS That is best suited for an Anchor for your boat. Now if you look around, There is a Glut of old Machinists willing to be talked out of solid Iron that Repeats, Repeats, Repeats...Get it? Oh, did I say Good machinery REPEATS? Do Not waste Good Money on this Chinese Crap-- The guy who made it with a Gun Barrel pressed to his temple did not care if it worked, Why Should You? Spend your worthless Fiat Currency on quality machines. No shortage.!
@@anneinfurna8528 - Are you somehow of the opinion that the point of this project is to arrive at a hunk of "solid iron that Repeats, Repeats, Repeats"? It is not. It is CLEARLY a light-hearted journey to see what adding 1000.00 of hard labor to an Underpowered laughable POS will actually produce, learn stuff along the way, and enjoy the process. It's a hobby. Lighten up, Francis. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-iN-aXzpQUdw.html
@@somebodyelse6673 Isn't the average cost of one of these chinese lathes about 500 dollars? All i am saying is that this money is better spent elsewhere. Light hearted is 20 - 35 dollars, not 500.You get out of something what you put into it--and this venture is not worth the results. Not to me.
I was thinking the exact same thing whilst watching this too. The V-Ways for the headstock, Saddle and Tailstock are shocking!!! The Saddle Gibbs need completely refab'ing. I bet the headstock bearings are just 'Off The Shelf' Roller bearings an not taper roller bearings and, how do you grease them? Those plastic gears!! No trust in them at all. Looking around, these Lathes start at about £500, I'd rather invest in a used Myford Super7 than one of these hunks of junk!
@@anneinfurna8528 these lathes can be purchased new for as low as $350 USD (Shipped!), and can usually do some decent work for less than 10 hours of fiddling, cleaning, and adjustment. From what I've read of other's experiences and my own, this lathe had a shocking number of issues right out of the box. For most people just getting into the hobby, as I was, these machines are a good starting point. As well, even in my area where larger quality metal lathes are regularly for sale I haven't been able to find one that runs for less than $3k. Anything under $2k would require so much work that the restoration itself would need to be your hobby. Yes, when compared to real machines these aren't much more than a toy that'll turn brass, aluminium, and plastic. They can still be a great learning tool for people new to machining, and the process of improving the machine is a valuable opportunity for learning how they work and machining useful parts.
Been waiting with baited breath for this, my mini lathe that I bought 10 years ago was still in the box until the last video ... its now disassembled, clean and deburred... Just waiting to get put back together :-) Thanks a LOT for this.
@@AdventureswithaVerySmallLathe Your level of detail and step by step format pushed me over the top. It was definitely worthwhile from my stand point :-) I needed THIS video... I have watched and re-watched hundreds of them and read and printed out 3 or 4 guides in my various aborted attempts to get a level of comfort from a knowledge perspective to get it done. I definitely needed the level of detail visually you presented apparently b/c after the 2nd time through it the box was back on the bench the lath was unpacked and after the 3rd or 4th time through the video it was disassembled and clean. De-burring took some more watching and courage :-) But Im going out to the shop to put it back together shortly. Again thank you sincerely.
@@grumpycat_1 I'm glad to hear that including plenty of detail is worth the effort. I'll keep doing my best to do that. Best of luck with your lathe, and I hope i brings you years of productive fun.
I hear ya, bro! I have been holding off purchasing one because of the cheapness...and I would only be utilizing the lathe as a hobby, not for a main income.
I have a similar lathe. Nothing is right. I highly recommend treating everything like a raw casting. My bed was not flat nor parrallel, the headstock was not aligned, the tailstock is an abomination, the bottom of the bed is not parallel with the top, etc. That being said, highly recommend as a project. I'm currently fabricating a flexture type tool post right now for it
I'm sure I heard Stephan Gotteswinter say once that Chinese machinery is fine as long as you treat it as a kit of parts that need finishing and assembly before you use them.
My similar lathe's worst part was probably the chuck that came with it. Seeing its interior, I thought it must have been cast in sand. I had to rework a good portion of the teeth so that it would not block when opening or closing.
Great video! This is exactly what I need to do to mine, I have cleaned and deburred it a while ago but there are no videos out there that go into enough detail to inspire enough confidence to actually make changes to it. You manage to do this with your attention to detail. I will be waiting with bated breath for each episode in this fantastically informative series. Thank you
Hi from Montreal Quebec. Thanks for nice video. I am by no mean at all a machinist but my sister is and she is working as a 3D software specialist for the avionics industry. I asked her to check on this lathe as I want to do some small parts for my other hobby, ham radio and automation. Getting to retire soon and need to setup my man cave with cool tools to play. After seing the video she told me to continu on listening to your stuff, you seem to know enough to help me going on.. So thanks again for the nice video and I am eager to see more coming!
I have had the exact same lathe (right down to the paint scheme) for about three years and went through this playlist when I first got it. Your videos were a great help in getting it to be useable. I am now in the process of doing a very thorough cleaning and so have gone through your videos again to make sure I don't forget something. My biggest issue was the getting the tailstock to align with the headstock. It is still not as perfect as I would like, but at least useable. I have made so many improvements that it is almost not the same lathe (collet chuck, qctp, homemade milling attachment, etc). I want to thankyou for your videos, I would have likely have given up on this lathe without your very detailed videos to guide me.
Cool, glad to know you found the videos useful. I still have aligning my tailstock to look forward to, but you can be sure I'll make a video on it when I do.
Really like these type of videos. I was a mechanical fitter in my former years. I think I understand why you are doing this. I think there are several reasons. Firstly because you can, you want a better lathe. you need a project. So is this a cost-effective way to do it. That is not counting your time.
I read a few comments on chinese laithes, like the belt broke only after 2 weeks, the on and off swich blew off ecc. So I decided to build my own. After waching this video I know I made the right decision. My hat goes up to you for your effort and the time you took to do all this. Great job.
Many thanks to skillshare for sponsoring this video, which will make other similar projects possible. The first 1000 people who click the link will get 2 free months of Skillshare Premium: skl.sh/adventureswithaverysmalllathe
The usefulness of this video can't be overstated! ;-) It really exposes many of the down sides of these inexpensive lathes. On the other hand it also open the doors for a lot of fine tunning and adjustments who can easily and cheaply turn it (no pun intended) into very capable machines. Over the years I encounter these issues many times. Making an inexpensive machine a perfectly functional piece of equipment is mostly on the end user hands. ;-) Cheers
I really appreciate the video. My own mini lathe shares nearly all of the same issues, and I will be cleaning and aligning it just like you show. Thanks again.
Very detailed video. I have a similar lathe and will use your info to dial mine in. One thing I already did was to replace the cap screws that hold the handles on the saddle and compound with stainless button head socket screws. The rounded head of these helps to keep from scrapping your knuckles in the cap screw head.
Glad I found this video again, I watched it way back when thinking of buying a mini lathe. I have now bought one that has had the control PCB blown, a common fault I understand, but that's no problem to me when I can buy it very cheap with little use. Whilst waiting for parts I will now strip it and follow you video, thanks.
well it's a lathe ru-vid.comUgkxN9zrzkkhnjUF5PQbuA_B1gYdsfCu9k6z but it wasn't what i would have anticipated. Headstock, tailstock, carriage apron are manufactured from aluminum now not cast iron. The spindle diameter for the bearings is too small allowing for a few play in the spindle so I am using some blue Loctite to take out the play.
I'm simply amazed at how many things that are wrong with this lathe. It will be super exciting to see you try and fix most of them. And very satisfying :D
Great video.I would say that the best thing one can do to the mini lathe is to harden the bed because my lathe has some years using, and it needs repaired.
I see you had a problem with the gear shifter, it won't disconnect from the gears below. I had that same problem during my assembly. I resolved it by pushing down the belt cover before tightening the cover screws. I just got my mini lathe yesterday, and i disassemble it to clean and removed those factory applies lubricants. Thank you for your 3 videos regarding this mini lathe. Your videos is a great help.
Welcome back, I’ve been looking forward to this video. The Aussie Shed channel has a playlist on improving a Chinese mini lathe, there may be some things of interest. Keep up the good work.
Thanks! I've already included all of The Aussie Shed videos into my playlist. Unfortunately RU-vid doesn't provide an easy way for me to share a link to the playlist, but you can find it on my channel page, on the playlists tab, "7" Lathe Improvements from all over RU-vid".
The 2 screws that you thought were for the motor adjustment i believe they are meant for adjusting the headstock not the motor. They make up for the gap on the flat surfaces and perhaps some angular adjustment....
I'm absolutely certain that's not the case, because they line up with voids in the headstock casting. No matter how much they protrude above the bed, they can't affect the position of the headstock. On the other wise, if the motor is not supported from above, the belt tension causes it to flap around and vibrate, because the main mounting studs provide almost no vertical rigidity.
Wow just Wow! It's like a representation of a lathe and it's anatomy but the parts that are there aren't really made to be used under any kind of working pressure.
What you have here is quite frankly typical for the cheap Chinesium lathes. I have had mine for a couple of years and the time I have spent upgrading and fixing the issues I found compared to the actual time spent actually using it I would estimate to be 20 to 1. I will say the the Aussie Shed gentleman's was by far the worst example of one I have ever seen out of the box but every single one of them have multiple issues. Some make them unusable until fixed. The T nut that clamps down the tail stock on mine was bent so badly it pulled it out of alignment by a full 1/8th inch when tightened. I also highly recommend the Aussie shed but another series of videos I would consider crucial for a new owner to watch would be Steve Jordan's. The compounds are garbage as you already know but Mr. Jordan has a saddle/cross slide upgrade That I would most highly recommend to get rid of those hokey saddle guides. Best of luck and I will be looking for your updates.
Great video! I've had one of these for 10 years, they're great. I've done quite a bit to mine but still have more to do. if you ever take the saddle off again, open the half nuts then slide it off the end of the leadscrew and vice versa. edit, I've just seen that you might not be able to take the leadscrew off the tailstock end, however you should be able to take off the 80t gear at the feed end and pull the leadscrew out through the control box and through the saddle.
Thanks for the edit, I was just about to ask about that. I've tried a few ways to take the overall leadscrew assembly apart, and I've not found an approach I'm happy with yet. I haven't removed the large plastic gears yet because they've been forced and tightened onto the shafts so hard they're cracked, and they may not survive the disassembly.
@@AdventureswithaVerySmallLathe I think its a very common issue with these unfortunately, I cracked one of the 20t gears because the part which joins gears "B" and "C" together was too large, I made a new part from phosphor bronze to remedy the issue. Arceurotrade sell a set of metal gears (part no 090-020-01800) which really are quite good, I bought mine in 2012 for £38, they have gone up in price but they are worth it in my opinion. The plastic gears which came with the lathe didn't give me any issues though to be fair. On my lathe, the bearing blocks and leadscrew are three separate components, does yours not come apart? maybe try to clamp the leadscrew between two bits of wood, and see if that hex bit will unscrew. If the right hand bearing block doesn't come off over the end of the leadscrew then your only option will be to bite the bullet and remove the gears if you need to remove the saddle again. Not that the saddle needs to come off regularly.
The tone and cadence of your voice reminds me of my grade school shop teacher, Mr. Day. Thanks for the great video and keep up the great work. My son and I look forward to watching all your videos. Cheers.
I have a warco wm180. Its technically a mini lathe I guess. Im blown away about how capable these little lathes are. It also blows me away about how creative people can be making the most out of their tools.
I recently received my chinese mini lathe, and it has the exact same feature where the headstock does not ride flat on the ways opposite the v-groove. However, after taking everything apart, cleaning things up, and reassembly, using a 0.002mm test indicator I've found that the headstock is within 0.01mm of being true to the ways in both axis and this is using the 3-jaw chuck and it's the chuck that has the small amount of runout, not the alignment. Yes, the head has a small tilt as a result of this, but not on an axis that matters in the least. The important thing, the v-grove runs almost perfectly parallel to the shaft in the headstock. Of course each person's mileage will vary with these lathes.. Someone commented that they must have gotten one of the laths that was built with all the reject parts.
Interesting. Good to hear that despite the issues the headstock is straight where it counts. Did you also find that the saddle has the same issues? One of my concerns is that the poor fit to the bed reduces the overall rigidity of the machine significantly, and tightening all four bolts holding the headstock would add a twist force to the bed.
@@AdventureswithaVerySmallLathe In my case I didn't find any issues where the bed warped when tightening the headstock. I put the most tension on the front and back bolts on the side where the v-grove is, and then just snugged up the opposite side which does not really sit flat on the bed just as your video shows. Once adjusting the lateral (x) adjustment on the tailstock I get a good alignment on the tail stock with the chuck. I suppose I got lucky on the Y axis (elevation) of the tailstock I think one way of fixing that if it doesn't align (hopefully it would fall too low) would be to run a shim to compensate along the back side of the head stock to get the proper Y alignment with the tail stock. The saddle (cross slide) seems to run true to the bed. It seems that the dimension between the top of the bed and the machined underside where the adjustment plates rub seem to be ok. I did find them a bit tricky to adjust properly.. I've seen a number of mods to the way they're configured on youtube. For now I've left mine stock. I noticed that both the plates had a slight curvature to them so they tended to come in contact with the underside of the ways on the ends. I found that adjusting the grub screws first and then tightening the center bolt first tended to flatten out the curve and then drawing up the two outside screws seems to work the best to get a good even tension on those places and increase the contact area. I get a nice smooth even drag on the cross slide all the way up and down the ways. In all of this I'm assuming that I just happened to get extremely lucky compared to what some others have received with this particular versions of the mini lathe.
I have a new mini lather and appreciate the video - thanks - Just one niggly point - by the time I got to 1:30 seconds I had already sat through two sets of 2 ads each by RU-vid PLUS the sponsorship ad for skillshare - is getting to be too much. Keep the good content coming 🙂
Wow, that's annoying, thanks for the heads up. It looks like RU-vid has automatically added a lot more mid-roll ad breaks than I realised. I've deleted most of them from this video, and gone through a bunch of others too. I do really appreciate the bit of ad revenue I get and it helps me fund more projects on this channel than I could otherwise do, but I don't want it to be annoying or pestering. Thanks for helping me improve this.
Thanks for a very interesting and ib´nstructive 2-part video. I bought basically the same type, from Warco in UK ca 1 year ago. They have obviously specified the lathe in some respects. They also unbox the lathe and check it up, maybe adjust things. In the shipping box I found a manual "CJ0618" but my one is 14" long. Warco supplied an excellent, UK made, manual. Most of the parts are the same as You show. The controll box is told to be American made so the controlls are differently situated. The geartrain for threading is all metall. At the time 17:00 You adjust the cross slide nut. I wish You had told how You did it, how You thought. Using the lathe for some times adjustments are likely needed. Adjusting gib screws feels okey. Time 35:45. Note the difference, between QCTP and the edge of the compund. When needed to lower tool holders extra they have to be milled off.
I've heard really good things about Warco, and they're definitely high up the list of places I'll go when I'm looking to upgrade to a bigger lathe for real work. (This Chinese lathe is for practice projects). At 17:00 I'm not really doing anything too clever, or accurate. The centre screw pushes the nut down, the two on either side pull it up, so I was trying to get it straight along the lead screw, at the right height that the screw is parallel to the movement so it doesn't get stuck. All I did was fiddle with these screws until the cross-slide seemed to be able to run smoothly from end to end. For the QCTP I haven't yet had a need to set the tool holder below the level, so haven't had to worry about that. I can see a need for it though. What tools in particular have you been using when you needed to do that?
@@AdventureswithaVerySmallLathe So You're not giving the leadscrew a slight angle, in the axial respect, to lower play/backlash from the nut? The toolholder I think of is a 250-007 part off holder. The blade is directed upwards. Parting of thick material the blade is sticking out more and more. Then the height of the cutting edge becomes higher and the holder had to be milled off by some 4 - 5 mm.
@@Stefan_Boerjesson No, I didn't think of setting the nut at an angle. Most of the backlash comes from the way the leadscrew flange is held by a pocket that is too large, so my first priority will be to fix that. I see what you mean about the 250-007. I've never tried using it, but I've heard from others that it is very limited by the way the tool slopes up.
Keep these videos coming. My crappy lathe arrives on Tuesday, and I'd like to get quite familiar with its shortcomings so I can use it to build a bigger/better one.
wonderfull mate, u thought me a lot am an age pensioner,and i did maintained my lathe too, also i had to change my motor into 2 hp, BUT i use belt and 5 ways pullyies, easy for me, many thanks
Onr of the first mods to the carriage is to replace the screws for the hold down plates with studs and shim packs. The shim packs keep the bars parrallel to the bed ways. Thanks
You may encounter a motor no-start or spasmodic speed jumping which is not related to failure of the electronic controller. If there is no other apparent cause, check the brush holders on the motor. They seem to be a press fit in the motor case on my machine, an older Taiwanese version with slightly better apparent build quality and tidier castwork. It has with most of the problems you identified. The brush holders had crept out when the motor became hot and one brush had lost contact once the motor cooled down. I could not think of any other way to secure the brush holders so I glued them back in place. It has been fine since. Two MOSFETS blew out in the controller and a replacement I bought. With good help from RS Components, I replaced them with parts of a higher load rating or voltage tolerance I don't have a strong understanding of electronics. I was told they would work and they have. Failure of the controller seemed to be provoked by selecting a slower speed while the spindle was running faster. Since then my preferred practice when wanting a slower speed is to stop the motor, then roll back the speed controller, start the motor and ramp the power up to the desired speed. This bug may have been solved long ago as the lathe was bought in 1994.
Thanks for the info dump, lots of really useful info. I'll adopt your practice when wanting to a slower speed, as i'm not keen to have to fiddle around re-soldering MOSFETs. Do you recall the part numbers of the higher load rated MOSFETs RS sorted out for you?
Ohh no, not another weird youtuber that have irl stuff to do besides making interesting videos on youtube :) Im an impatient man and don't want to wait months between episodes. Where is the commitment, people? :)
Tapered headstock bearings a must , as I have the same lathe. I had to shim my tail stock and spend sometime getting it on center along with indicating the barrel so it runs out straight. I recommend a halfway decent Quick change tool post not the eBay $40 aluminum Jobbie. OXA Wedge type tool post will do the job.
A steel OXA wedge type is the one I have. You should be able to see in this video at 35:42, but if not I did a review video which went through the installation.
Go to 2:32 and hit pause.......the two inner bolts are for leveling the blue assembly. Screwing them up through the bed will hold it level. When you tighten the outer Allen screws it will pull downward locking the blue assemble level and tight against the inner bolts. I don't think those bolts are for the motor. .
Thanks for the tip! I'm actually considering something he mentions in this video, but doesn't do: trying out anglular contact bearings instead of taper roller bearings.
That's one interesting shot for me with the Leggo(tm) men, the traverse half-nuts on mine were only a single half-nut and bent bit of metal retaining. There was a plate chip-cover over the leadscrew which got in the way of having both nuts on. We had to get a new set because they snapped turning a thickish bit of mild steel so we ditched the cover and just use a paintbrush-sweeper and a lot of care.. I've ordered the bronze for the bush, yeah will be nice. Considering putting a couple of steppers on for a bit of computer-numerical-control and this should help. Or even turning it with just a battery-drill. That's the only limitation for me of mine, the traverse just flies along too quick! Great lockdown video, good work. NEAL
My Mini lathe is almost exactly like this one in design. The tailstock is different, you have a much better locking to ways arrangement. I have a threading engagement wheel dial on my saddle My drive screw is 16T.
At least your using the best allen keys money can buy. Best thing i ever done was junk one of them lathes. For a newbie they are more than enough to turn anyone away, for a few quid more could have a proper lathe secondhand.
These are lathes, they are kits. The only reason to own one is as a YT creator, many of your viewers own one. I'm wondering if one will fall into my lap at some point in the future. I must admit to curiosity and watching many videos on them. Liked.
There should be a dog point grub screw with a locking nut underneath the quill end of the tailstock casting. That stops rotation and over travel of the quill
ON many of these gibs the design seems to be just to allow the centre one of the grub screws to engage in its detent for location, whilst the other screws just contact the gib itself.. The other detents may as well not be there, perhaps the gibs are used in other slides. Very common in Far east imports.
Another good video, You could make this channel big. Sell your fixed lathe for a profit and buy more cheap lathes from different sellers and other brands and keep on doing it, and that way us viewers can buy your fixed ones and also no where to get better quality ones from
Listen up everybody.......the guy who says that this lathe cannot cut steel doesn't know a toss about lathes or any machine for that matter......many years ago in 1966 I built a small lathe, 50mm centre height and 200mm between centres......that is a micro lathe without doubt but it cuts steel like cheese.........those that dispute it have never used a lathe......I still have and use this lathe and it still cuts steel........probably mainly due to the headstock bearings being taper roller......I use HSS all of the time, hand ground and a bit of carbide occasionally. The biggest job it did was Morris Minor brake drums with the headstock raised up on a block to clear the bed.
Hi. That motor wiring laying on the motor is unsafe. The insulation is going to chafe through - motors vibrate - and if you should have a protective conductor fault (earth) on the motor or in your house wiring you are at serious risk of a possibly fatal electric shock. Don’t use it like this. A sheath alone does not really help, that too will wear through, it will just take longer. Re-route the wires so they are in a sheath and crucially do not lay on the motor. Where cables pass through the casting there should be a rubber grommet for much the same reason. Stay safe. BobUK.
I've never thought before but I suppose it can be a hobby in itself to get a broken old or badly made new machine and spend our free time trying to get it to run properly.... I've always considered these machines to be an inconvenience.... but it's a matter of perspective..... they can also be seen as many weeks of entertaining tinkering.
you must be getting a bit wiser to recognize this. Ditto crappy musical instruments made to sound wonderful in the hands of a competent player... and yes, watching and commenting on youtube videos... and of course commenting on the comments.... whew!
I've sometimes wondered which would be the easiest route to a small hobby lathe... either taking the Chinese route and needing to repair, restore and/or rebuild it.... or going Gingery and building the entire thing from scratch.......
I've watched some of those Gingery build project videos, and they seem to be pretty major commitments, and require quite a bit of expertise. I feel like the improvement work I'm doing is quite a bit easier.
Minute 18:42 : the spacing screws are used to get the saddle on slides without any gap. To be adjusted until saddle can freely run on guides without any gap, and not any friction due to the underside guides ( that is an antithesis ! ). I went on this work many years ago, when i bought my minilathe ( Einhell MTB 3000, very similar to the lathe been descripted ). Believing guides were ok, i had to file just a bit ( only with thin sand paper ! ) on the underside, till i got no gap and no friction ( or . . . very little gap and costant friction ! ). Untill today, it works ok, though i met in time other problems ( gear in the box broken, they were plastics ! and so on . . . ), . . . but i solved all . . . and i'm happy lathing . . .
How does someone assemble a lathe with so many parts that just doesn't fit together in the first place? I kind of want to believe it was manufactured on a production line in some kind of factory, and that it wasn't a one off design. So how did they end up with for instance all these pieces where the holes for the grub screws doesn't line up? What was that, four of these pieces for the different slides? And not one of them really fitting... And that's just one of the problems with this lathe. Boggles my mind... Question about the added grub screws added to align the flanges holding the slide to the bed. Won't these work their way out when the lathe is being used, or will they be secured with locking nuts or/and locktite when the fitting has been completed?
The bad fit is very frustrating. The gibs are the most obvious, and the most mysterious. I can only assume the design was changed at some point, but there were surplus parts, or the production specs weren't correctly updated. I think you're right to be concerned about the grub screws in the hold-down plates, but those aren't a good long term solution anyway. There are a few ideas out there to improve this, from shimming the plates, to completely replacing them with tapered gibs.
If I waited until I'd fixed all the faults before making another video, it'd be a couple of years before it came out. It'll come apart and go back together many times before we're done.
@@AdventureswithaVerySmallLathe Still, wouldn't this be the last part in a "chinese lathe fault fixing series"? If there is going to be a series, that is? :)
I recently purchased a can of 3-IN-ONE oil, just as you are using here. In my youth, I seem to recall, it was much thicker - less runny - than it is now. I see the 3-IN-ONE you are using here tends to run out just like mine, making a mess rather than staying where you want it. I feel it is tending more toward a "penetrating oil" than a lubricant. The name 3-IN-ONE has changed hands many times over the years, and it just isn't what it used to be. Sadly, I find this to be true of many other products as well.
I don't think that can be true, because they are lined up with voids in the headstock casting. No amount of adjusting to those bolts makes any difference to the headstock or chuck. However without them there is nothing to keep the motor in place, or the belt tensioned.
What about phosphor bronze washers to take up the slack in the adjusters? They would hold oil and you could change the thickness to get all the backlash out and not be too tight.
I can not understand why disassemble it , clean and reassemble and not fix the issues as found like the head stock gap and other things during reassembley
The answer is simply lack of time. If I did all the work I want to do to this lathe first, and tried to make a video out of that, the video would be hours long, and you'd still be waiting years from now. The first disassembly, cleaning, and re-assembly were done in a couple of days to learn about the machine. I've already started on some of the improvements, but good videos take time to make, so they'll appear here as I complete them.
Wow, your Chinese lathe make my Chinese lathe, mill. And drill look like a much better the average made Chinese machine. My machine is horrible but is fixable with a ton of work, i hope. Thanks for sharing
My 80+ year old lathe has shims that hold the cartridge slides off the bed so it doesn’t act like a clamp. There are multiple shims of different sizes to you can add and remove them as the slides wear. The apron is assembled first then the lead screw is inserted last. Not sure if that would help in your case Interesting video. I’m surprised by the way the head stock fits on the bed. Looking forward to seeing how you solve these problems.
With just about everything being "Made In China" these days it is important to remember that everything is built to a price. If Harbour Freight ask Chinese suppliers to make lathes to a price point the manufacturer can only do so by cutting corners/quality if he is to stay in business. Even decent mini lathes like Warco are made in China I believe, they just have a different price-point and insist on consistent quality. I have one of these Chinese Mini lathes and yes in some areas it is sadly lacking in quality and yes I will need to do things to make it better, but that is part of the fun too.
I would have liked to see how you re-mounted the chuck because after doing this myself on this type of lathe there is a bad loss of concentricity ever since🙁
That's not good, how bad is the runout? I didn't do anything special at all. I just placed the chuck onto the register, and threaded on the three nuts. Can your chuck shift slightly against the face plate if the nuts aren't quite tight? The inner diameter of the back of the chuck should be sitting snuggly on the spindle plate register, ensuring that it can't really move.
@@AdventureswithaVerySmallLathe the register has 0.1mm runout, the chuck 0.23 mm. Before removing the chuck it was much less I remember. However I guess the runout of the register was there before. I conclude that the manufacturer has a procedure to somehow set the combination register-chuck in a way that the flaws of the register can be egalized when fixing the chuck.
Just look at all the work that went into this. It's too bad they don't sell kits. All you need are the main heavy castings and hand wheels. All other parts like chucks, motors, gears. are pretty standard or easy to make.
Adventures with a Very Small Lathe have you tried arc euro trade I get all my parts from them and it’s fast delivery hope it helps all the best stay safe
I have thoroughly enjoyed watching this group of videos on your lathe. It would seem the manufacturer needs to improve their quality control methods a bit.
Good job very informative. Did you think about repainting the lath body before you reassembled everything? Where did you get the multicolored Allen wrenches they were your go to wrenches for the lath Assembly and takedown, seemed like great tools for this type of work. Thanks again for the video!
Thanks! I'll definitely be repainting the lathe at some point, but it'll be much later in the overall improvement process, so the paint doesn't get damaged by the frequent disassembly and reassembly. The allen wrenches are Wera, and many people call them the finest money can buy. You can get them from Amazon, or many other tool sellers. Beware of cheap imitations coloured to look the same.
It seems to me that two screws with nuts should level headstock in proper position. Motor has threaded hole (for missing screw) on upper side for belt tensioning (10:16 in previous video).
Best of luck sorting that appalling excuse for a tool out! Very entertaining to watch, I'll be interested how a small workshop like yours goes about tackling the catalog of problems that are inherent to this lathes construction.
Assembly and fitting of a chinese lathe kit. Even at chinese labor rates, that labor would make these pretty expensive. Mine still has a few random problems.
When sorting out the dreadful motor mount, consider also reinforcing the casting that 'holds' the headstock. I'm sure you will come up with an elegant solution that fixes stiffness and alignment as well as holding the motor
thank you for those two excellent vid's of this type of (Chinese) 'cheap' lathe's. I'm curious if you had already a solution for the plastic wheels where on was broken/cracked while it was still new !
Personally, I would say the 'motor adjusting bolts' are really to compensate for the incorrect head to slideway assembly and should be used to adjust head-stock level and parallel to bed? Not a very good solution but better than having things clamped at an angle
They could be used for that, but then there would be nothing to keep the motor stable, and tension the drive belt. Without them the motor is very unstable, and the belt tension would likely eventually rip the mounting screws out of their heads.
@@AdventureswithaVerySmallLathe I've got an EMCO 7x12 and it doesn't have the 'motor adjuster bolts' which is why I speculated they are to adjust head-stock. The bolts haven't torn out of motor in the 17 years or so I've had it (which actually surprises me as they are only inserted 2~3 threads) I very rarely machine steel on it though, usually 6061 or bronze plus stainless steel a few times. It's done a lot of things much too big for it
