I wish he had told me this sooner, not after I had spent money and time to restore it to its original configuration, IF this is true. A member told me that there is one lathe where the Harbor Freight lathe is better, and that is the Atlas lathe. I attended the local machinist club yesterday. Can anyone tell me where amateur machinist, as well as old timer machinists, like the one who said the Harbor Freight is better, are getting these sentiments and how accurate they are? Stan I do not know to what he was referring, but I suspect it was the accuracy of the rotational axis of the spindle, and maybe the alignment of the Morris taper in the spindle to its rotational axis. When my machinist friend bought one of the new fandangled lathes to replace it in 2002, he said the Atlas lathe (after I had it for awhile) was more accurate than the new one he bought. I cannot imagine a Harbor Freight lathe is better than my 10F. He was a real machinist, I feel gifted, and worked as a machinist making nuclear reactor parts.
He used it to make many things, one a 9" diameter worm gear and worm from a steel (stainless?) disk, for example. Further, my lathe served my machinist friend very well, probably since the early 1960's up to when he sold it to me in 2002. I think calling it a 'hobby' lathe denigrates it. I doubt the Atlas lathes when they came out in the late 1930's (?) and into the 1950's were sold as 'hobby' lathes, maybe as home shop lathes but not 'hobby' lathes. I do not understand either of these claims. Also, a couple members said the Atlas lathe is a 'hobby' lathe. As long as a metal is ductile, it will deform when processed via metal turning.I attended the local machinist club yesterday. As the CNC lathe exposes the metal piece to rotational force, the metal piece compresses and deforms, thus increasing its tensile strength.įurthermore, metal turning works on most all ductile metals, including stainless steel, steel alloys, aluminum, bronze, iron and more. Since it compresses metal pieces, metal turning may increase the strength and performance over the finished product. This makes metal turning easier and even safer to perform than hot-working processes. Instead, the metal is deformed and reshaped without being exposed to heat.
Since its a type of cold-working process, it doesn’t require the smelting or heating of metal. Metal turning offers a variety of benefits, one of which is ease of use. When metal spinning is performed by hand, a worker manually presses the mold against the metal piece. The rotational power of the CNC lathe then deforms the metal piece to achieve the same shape as the mold. Once in place, the CNC lathe is activated to rotate and press the mold against the metal piece. The metal piece is typically secured using a pressure pad. When a CNC lathe is used in metal turning, a worker will begin by placing a circular-, square- or rectangular-shaped piece of metal into the CNC lathe’s drive area. CNC lathes allow workers to control and automate the metal spinning process by programming the turning machine’s operations into a computer program. Metal turning can be performed manually by hand or with a CNC lathe, the latter of which is preferred because of its ability to streamline the process. Rather, metal spinning changes the shape of metal to reflect that of the mold on which it was spun. Unlike with other metal turning processes, however, it doesn’t strip away or otherwise remove any of the metal material.
Also known as metal turning, metal spinning is a type of metalworking process that involves the use of a rotating machine - typically a CNC lathe - to deform metal over a pre-shaped mold.