rearenginekarts.com

I recently acquired a South Bend lathe and needed a lot of operation information (never ran a lathe before in my life) .. I figured I would share some scanned books I found, since many of you probably also have lathes at home. These books cover good basic information that would apply to many brands of lathes besides just South Bend. The How to Run a Lathe book is a vintage classic, and to be really vintage correct, you should be using a vintage lathe, lol!!!!







Feel free to add to this thread with any useful machine shop equipment info, scanned documents, photos of your home shop, whatever, etc....

Jeff

The one thing our shop teacher unintentionally demonstrated to us was to NEVER leave the key in the chuck We did not see him for the rest of the day .

Brian

Ya gotta think every guy in HS did that...once...and only once.....Gads, do the kids in school today even have shop class???? prolly not , been replaced with social networking class....and learning how to text and drive at the same time....

Gary w

There are a boat load of utube videos showing various machine operations. Some are very good.
I went through machine shop training in the service for several months and then they made me a truck driver. Maybe there's a reason there but I never practiced what I learned. The videos help bring some of it back, now I'm really dangerous!

one thing i relearned recently is never let your focus leave the lathe.
i was cutting a flat on a very irregular surface (a big no, no anyway)
things were going smooth despite the danger when my *&^%$# cell phone rang.

i left the lathe spinning (another big no no) and answered the phone.
my sweetie was wondering why i wasn't at her house yet.

anyway went back to what i was doing but forgot i'd already advanced the cutter a 1/4 turn.
so i turned in the cutter a quarter turn in like each other pass but it was really in 1/2 turn.
as soon as the tooth touched the piece it got hung.

in less than a second all sorts of exiting things happened.
i heard a big chunk sound.
the lathe stopped spinning .
then the piece (about 1# aluminum) blew out of the chuck and went to bouncing around the shop.
i figured it was a close enough call and shut down the lathe for the night.

the next day i rechucked the piece but i couldn't seem to get the lathe to run smooth.
the upshoot was i broke the cast head stock when i hung the lathe.
RUINED my wood/metal lathe.

so no more cell phones for me in the shop.
i turn it off as soon as i start with any tooling.
dave

Thanks for the downloads Jeff, good stuff.

There is a great publisher of rare, odd-ball, out of print, old timey, DIY books called Lindsay's Technical Books.
http://www.lindsaybks.com/

I've got a 4-5 reprints from them on how to run a milling machine and they sell copies of the manuals above at a VERY reasonable price (probably a lot cheaper than having it printed yourself). If you buy something from them, they'll send you a copy of their catalog, the catalog is really quirky and funny in and of itself.

Dan