UPS dropped my 7 x 14 at least 4 times before delivery. I foolishly opened it. If you buy a mini-lathe and it shows *any* damage to the packing on delivery, refuse it. Any other course of action will result in getting screwed by UPS.
Aside from the broken cross slide screw which did *not* match the parts that Small Machine shop sells and had to be supplied by the seller, dropping it upside down after the initial warm up drops of 3-4 ft spanked the inboard bearing. I'll get replacements eventually, but for now I simply moved the damaged bearing to the outboard position. I've got a single shot rifle to build and I don't need better than 1-2 thou for that. But I'll eventually be out the $70 or so for replacement bearings if I don't change over to conical bearings.
I'd already completely stripped the machine, removed paint and filler, burrs, etc. Then I got much too serious about buying electronic test gear and just making basic checks and a few repairs on four 5 ft stacks of gear forced the mini-lathe into storage for a while.
Then I had the luck to get a very nicely refinished Page-Lewis Model C Olympic .22 LR single shot rifle. The Page-Lewis is one of 3 rifles I know of which were built from flat steel stock and by far the better design. This triggered a 40 year dream of building such a rifle from scratch. Sadly, the original ejector and spring got lost so I had to make a replacement. Doing that in a 10" x 20" Clausing 4902 using a 3 jaw chuck was rather scary as I had to file the workpiece with about 1/2" of stock sticking out. I made a working replacement though I'm not happy with it as it was made from a 16 p nail. It works and I have no desire to work that close to the 3 jaw again. So time to get the mini-lathe going so I can use an ER-32 collet.
All of this is somewhat driven by having spent 18 months or more deeply immersed in FPGA logic and analog filter design which make it seem like a nice break. Especially as I do not plan to attempt the really fiddly stuff where you work for a few minutes, let everything cool off for a few hours, measure and repeat. I'm just going to address obvious faults and get it to basic ASME lathe standards for now.
I have created 3 related lists on groups.io:
machine-tool-rebuilding
projects-in-metal
single-shot-rifles
while some overlap is inevitable, I'm trying to separate my posts so that the design aspects of making a single shot will appear in that list, but actually making the parts will appear in projects-in-metal. Machine modification will appear in machine-tool-rebuilding. Eventually accompanied by the repair of my Craftsman table saw as well as an Armor horizontal mill and some other projects Dad left me to finish.
Have Fun!
Reg
