My New (To Me) Lathe

A big shout of thanks to all of you who validated my psychosis. What'n the hell kind of friends are you? Has no one got my back?

It's been building up inside and then at last week's hang, I couldn't keep it to myself anymore. I asked Glen what size lathe I might need. Then I emailed Alex with the same question. I do work in a building full of machinists, but I wanted to know what guys who do exactly the kind of work that I wanna do think. Size does matter.

Alex, being the guy he is, adopted my cause and went out on the interwebs to find me a couple of prospects. After that, things moved incredibly fast. I was out the door at 5:30 a.m. on Saturday morning, pocket full of Franklins, trailer in tow, en route to Moscow.  Once there, a deal was made.  I headed for home with a buncha parts.

It has a couple of rough edges, but all in all, it's in pretty decent shape.  This was easily straightenable.

Oh btw, it's Chinese.  This is one of the upside-down pedestals.  They don't believe in wasting paint where it's not necessary.

The guy I bouht it from put some aluminum bars with levelling feet on the pedestals.  Sweet.

Here's the base, after some tuning up and assembly.

I don't know where it belongs in my shop yet.  I need to use it for a while to figure that out.  So I'm putting it on this skid, so I can move it around more easily.

I put this together to lift the lathe out of the trailer.

The pick.

The hang.

Unification.

I can jockey it around with a pry bar,

or set it on rollers.

All this activity was taking up all of the garage shop, but the lathe and car are now both parked.  Peace once again reigns in the house.

It will take a while to get it all set up.  Even longer for me to get a clue about how to use it.  About the only thing you can be sure of is that I will bore you with an endless stream of details.