Thanks for all the interesting comments. "The Good The Bad and the Ugly" certainly seems to apply to this old lathe!?
Yes I did learn how to quickly set up a 4-jaw chuck, and how to go about teaching a course, and a few other things watching YouTube in preparing for the course, and several tips from Peter. ?
Peter mainly focused on measurement instruments and techniques. But as a first step in actually learning to use the lathe we practically ignored actually measuring things on the lathe and this gave students confidence that they could actually do something. In my opinion, measuring, tool angles and speeds can come later. It is not a comprehensive lathe apprenticeship! I did talk about how to grind HSS tools, but after briefly mentioning the various angles, clearances and rake, pointed out that they can do most things with removable carbide tips. They can play around with grinding their own HSS by trial and error or looking up references to get the angles as time goes by. ?For hobby work you can try a lot of things that you would never get away with in a production environment. The same goes for cutting speeds. In a first course we mainly want to boost confidence and make things as easy as possible. Certainly these things can be mentioned but not emphasized. The list of recommended YouTube channels should help expand on the basics.
Yes, I do plan to do this again. In fact it came about because I had been talking to people at the Inventor Center where I live in Kingsport, Tennessee about teaching a course when their new Grizzly lathe arrives. Then when I arrived at our holiday home in New Zealand I found that the local MeNZshed had just acquired an old Myford lathe from another MeNZshed who had more lathes than they needed, but there seemed to be no one around who knew much about using it. So I thought it would be a good time to learn how to teach it. My father was an engineering teacher at Te Puke High School in NZ. ?Then I found out that Peter was a professional Fitter and Turner. I told him HE should teach the course, but he insisted that a new voice was needed in the club. In the end we did most of it together.?
I have been asked a lot of questions about the course and students. They will all have access to this same lathe as they are already members of the MeNZshed ($50 per year). None have mentioned a desire to get their own lathe but that might come later. The primary interest seems to be in non-specific hobby work but they were fascinated by the range of things that could be made and the pretty polished brass object they produced. ?One wanted to make weights for curtain draw strings. Another was a farmer who asked about making bushes for machinery. Measurement will be very important for that.
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Evan
Lathe: 1955 Boxford Model A with screw cutting gearbox, power feed with several accessories, hand tools and a pillar drill press.
Try my Free Online Gear train Software:
You enter a thread pitch or TPI and it shows you a range of gear trains and gearbox setting to use and even a scale drawing of the gear train.
It also includes calculations for taper turning by the tailstock offset method, and cutting speeds.
It includes the specifications for many thread types eg metric, UNC, BSW, and BA.
Displays drill sizes for tapping threads at any percent thread depth (with full explanations).
My YouTube Channel and Playlist about using an engineers lathe: ?
Project to build a Greek Hero steam engine and measure its power output:?
Evan