- Local time
- 7:30 AM
- User ID
- 522
- Joined
- Jan 12, 2016
- Messages
- 3,920
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- Location
- Iowa City
Yes the demand for big lathes is going away. The Monarch my dad had was used for making driveshafts for big trucks. And some side jobs making shafts for saw mills and threading & tapering shafts for inboard boats (his shop was 200 yards from salt water on the south Atlantic coast). It was 18 inch swing and 12 feet centers. A nice, accurate machine, Monarch was the King of metal lathes, very well designed and made. I learned all about running a lathe on the Monarch: Speeds, feeds, threading, turning tapers, grinding tool bits. There was a monorail over the lathe with a 2 ton electric hoist, very handy when I had to machine a 10 foot piece of 6 inch diameter 4140.
Lathes are handy:
Boring a sprocket in the backyard shop:
Truing the receiver ring on a Remington M700:
Chambering a rifle barrel:
Putting an oil groove in a motorcycle con rod. Note the tooling bolted to the face plate, the con rod clamps to a turned area for accuracy.
The adapter has different sized plugs for different bore con rods. I had 40 of them to put grooves in, half standard journal size and half were 0.010" under. This is a 13 inch lathe, the rods just barely fit!
Turning a barrel blank. Smoke is from the coolant, it has a low flash point, helps to remove heat from the cut. Good 'ol machine shop smell!
Between centers, using a dog and a faceplate.
Is that a floating reamer holder? I'd like to get into machining some gun stuff. I'd like to re-barrel my mini-14.