The 3HP Mini Lathe..... It Scares Me 

This is indeed impressive. 3HP is the business to be sure. But what’s going on with your centre at 12:43? It looks like it’s wobbling excessively. Also, you should get better results with a coolant feed.

Maybe mini lathes are the production workhorses that you have been needing :)

@@artisanmakes 🤯

Haha yes it's really strange people offer that much money, time and effort trying to make their cheap machine usable. 😅

Good luck to you man, and I hope you get your real 14x40 or similar. These toy lathes will just frustrate you and make you wish you had a real one.

So, let's see we pay $400-$600 for the lathe then we spend another $3,000-$5,000 in time and materials to still end up with a 7x X lathe. They are what they are, a SMALL lathe to make SMALL parts. If you need a lathe to make larger parts or want to go faster choke up the dough and get a more suitable lathe that doesn't need a bazillion upgrades just to make chips. As they say don't be penny wise and dollar foolish.

@@mikemike4737 do you really think I'm jealous?? 😅😅 Also, for 1500$ you could get a good, used machine.. working from the start..

@@OmeMachining Not in Australia you won't.

this motor will definitly overlife this lathe but with one condition. He need some type of foam to cover air intake to the engine otherwise chips would just kill it from inside... :) I allready had to make that "upgrade" on my mx-750 becuse motor start to get weird noises, so opened it and there was a lot of chips inside, so I added foam and they just cant find way inside anymore :)

@@KenjiDevit looks like a tefc motor so it should be fine

​@@KenjiDev wouldn't mesh work better?

yuuup duty cycle matters

The extra rotating mass of the motor will also help smooth running.

Andy Philpotts-I was going to say the same thing. Whether the center joke was centered or the live center was showing that it’s got some play 🤷🏼‍♂️

Flywheels are good for storing energy over time and then releasing in a short period of time, or at some later time. Think of a hammer application or similar. For a continuous smooth output, like a lathe requires, the flywheel probably (sadly) won't add any power/energy/momentum benefits. I would like to see the experiment though!

spin up and down really doesnt matter much on a lathe however you gotta be really careful about balancing it or youll wreck bearings

Thats nothing i'd worry about. I took the part out of the lathe and didnt spend much time recentering it, hence the wobble

Ugh, just the name Vevor makes me shudder, what a nightmare that purchase was... 3 years ago I bought a Vevor MX-600 and that piece of utter shit was so worthless I haven't been able to make a single piece of work on it to this very day. The bed was so devastatingly bad (as much as 0,17 mm of variation in thickness along the bed), and god knows what else. Those a**holes from Vevor did everything they could to get out from underneath it too, I inmediately opened a complaint procedure, but I only had something like 24 or 48 hours time at some stage to respond to their offensive suggestion of getting a 10% discount (it was literally just scrap cast iron, in order to have it repaired I would have to spend €1500+ and thus better off buying a brand new one here in Western Europe), and that happened to be just over the Christmas holidays when I was unable to respond in time, so that finalised it and left me with that hunk of scrap iron. Being a poor student at the time and unable to recouperate my €1050 I paid for the lathe, I was forced to repair the whole thing myself, all the while having no previous experience in metalworking whatsoever, so it's been a huge challenge to put it mildly. Several times it just became too much and I threw in the towel for a while, only to pick it up again some months later. Eventually I had read up on everything enough and done enough research to know what I needed to do in order to turn it into a usable, or actually even a good machine for its size. Sending the bed out to a company to grind the bed and lathe ways into spec would have cost me €1500-2000 depending on the company, which was way out of budget not to mention simply not worth it, so instead I resorted to hand scraping. Through a Dutch company which specialises in auctioning off company stock I managed to win the bid for a cast iron precision 1000 mm long camel back, which along with some dark blue oil paint and a roller made it possible to get all the ways back into spec. Originally I intended to hand scrape it, but during my research I found out about an alternative method, instead of hand scraping it uses a rotary tool with one of those carborundum grinding wheels. I gave it a try and it actually worked amazingly well, and with the added benefit of not really needing a lot of previous experience and skill to do it well like is the case with scraping. However it also gave a bad surface finish, much too course, so I tried the same but with sanding drums on my rotary tool instead, which gave very smooth results! At this moment I'm half way done, there are 6 surfaces which need to be brought into spec; the flat ways at the front and one at the back, the prisms at the front and one at the back, and the undersides at the front and at the back. Originally I had planned to exclusively use the rotary tool in combination with my camel back to bring the ways back into spec, but more recently after having made a set of my own carbide scrapers I have decided I will use the rotary tool to bring it approximately 95% into spec and the last 5% I'll finish by hand scraping, as that's much more preferrable on bed ways that need to retain lubrication. From there on I still have a couple more things I need to do, like making sure all the dovetails and other important areas mate with each other nicely, that the headstock and tailstock are perfectly aligned with the bed and to each other, replace the deep grove headstock bearings for the set of tapered roller bearings I already bought, and a couple other small things which will improve the lathe. I intend to be finished in about another 6 months or so.

made may day!

I would have thought this to be the case

That could be because he was using a fixed speed AC motor until now. This upgrade should help quite a bit.

All Hail the Algorithm .... superfastmatt.

Neat. If it works for you that is great

I recommend Adult diapers as an upgrade 😂

Tapered roller bearings can really tolerate a lot of force, no issues there. My lathe came with those from the factory, but I noticed that it's not so nice that there's no seal in front of it. On mine it sounds like it's already grinding down on some small chips that got in there.

Tapered roller bearing hold the wheels on cars and can handle the dynamic loads created by turning and slamming large weight over pot holes and the grease lasts for years. I think this setup is fine.

@@cwilliams4227 Yeah but I think Ricks point was the grease can get flung off. Cars used sealed roller bearings, so the grease is retained inside.

Dept of cut is one thing. Feed is another ☺️ not many machines under +2000kg is capable of both 😁

@@OmeMachining of course 👍

I can take 1/4" depth of cut on steel all day long on an Acra 14x40, which honestly isn't a great lathe. It's just, you know, a real lathe, unlike these little mini-lathes.

Having a proper geared lathe makes a big difference as well, as it will harness the maximum amount of torque out of the motor.

I don't think he really understands how induction motors and VFDs actually work. This whole thing could have been done with almost zero expense and a much better result using a 1.5-2.5 HP DC motor and MC2100 controller from a discarded mid-size treadmill. DC means 100% torque at zero RPM so it reduces the need for gearing, however the treadmill motors spin faster so you need a small (original) pulley on the motor to get the spindle revs within a usable range.

He's still digging the swarf out of the roof girders😂