Lathe

The Unimat is free. It has quite a bit of tooling with it.
They are made for machining metal-but in small amounts. Unimats are great little tools if you use them as they were designed to be used. They are delicate tools for delicate work.
Some people can't figure that out.
:rolleyes:
 
You mean,no .150 thou off the dia cuts in 3 in 17-4 PH at a .012 feed?
How am I going to have any fun? :)
 
I am on my 4th lathe in 16 years of amateur gunsmithing [but still my first wife in 40 years]. [Get a big lathe with DRO]

I also have a mini lathe that I use to spin arbors with wire wheels or other abrasives.

It is set back on a bench and the dirt and wheel pieces that fly cannot hit me as I am out of the plane of the whirling disk.

I use the mini every day for abrasives. I chamber a handgun barrel on it every few years.

The 3 jaw chuck on the mini lathe is so much faster than the arbors on my grinders.
 

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It is not a "Mini lathe". It does not have the power to do much of anything. I saw a junky cheaply priced "Mini lathe" at a place called harbor freight. At least you could thread on that one. If you cannot do "Delicate work" on a larger machine, maybe you should practice more.
 
What part of "he already has it" can you not understand?
He isn't looking to buy a lathe.

The little lathe is useful for small parts.
 
'Cept I'm still trying to figure out how you can do a basic turning operation- like taking six thou off the diameter of a part, when you have no dials:eek:
 
Its difficult to tell from the pic,but they do have graduated dials on the cross slide and compound.Yes,you can dial for a .006 cut.More than likely,that would be .003 on the dial.
Watchmaker lathes do not have dials.If you have a spindle and a file you can get some things done.
As Mr DeShivs said,he has it,for free.
As I said,don't let what you cannot do prevent you from doing what you can do.

I certainly do not advocate for a Unimat.I personally would not buy one.But I could get some things done with one.

But then I would probably not buy a Hardinge HLV Toolroom lathe for my only lathe.They are remarkable in many ways,but there are times when they get in their own way.I prefer the old Monarch toolroom lathe.
If I were buying a lathe,it would have to be capable of a 5-C drawbar through the spindle.Etc.
I would guess if I were making RC models I could do a lot with a Unimat.

But if I had a Unimat,maybe some day I'd REALLY want a 15 in Colchester.

My brother has a really nice Dillon 1050 with a case feeder and a power trimmer,etc.And a Square Deal. Plus a single stage.Really nice reloading room.

About 35 years ago,he bought a Dan Wesson .357.Young man working in a tire shop.

I bought him a mallet type Lee Loader and a bullet mold.He had his own hammer.He had wheel weights. He was real happy,he could load ammo for his handgun.
You start someplace.
 
'Cept I'm still trying to figure out how you can do a basic turning operation- like taking six thou off the diameter of a part, when you have no dials
Click to expand...

Dial Indicator, it will most likely be more accurate then the dials on the lathe.

Best Regards
Bob Hunter
 
Thanks everyone, maybe it could be fun playing around on those winter days when it's too nasty to be outside much. I'll see what I can learn. Years ago I knew a guy who was a machinist and was in awe of what he could do, of course he was a professional and had access to great equipment lol, still it could better than watching the tv
Click to expand...


Good plan, I can do a lot things on a mill and a lathe, all my skills on them are self taught.

I have several friends that's "toolers" one of them told me that most machining skills is common sense. He told me to get a "Machinery Handbook" learn speeds and feeds for different types of tooling and metals, do my machine set-ups and start learning.

Best Regards
Bob Hunter
 
I bought one of these new when I was just out of high school (1969) at which point they cost $125, which seemed like a fortune to me then. I no longer even remember what specific task caused me to cough up that much money for anything that wasn't possible to drive on the road, but there was something I needed it for and that it did. It comes with a post so you can remove the headstock and mount it to do milling operations within the limited X-Y range of the bed and cross-slide. It has a tailstock and both spindle and tailstock dead centers (same size). Accessories available at the time included a change gear set and lead screw for threading and power feed, a watchmaker's collet spindle and collets, a live center and other odds and ends.

The cross slide on this tool is not compound—it's most sever limitation, IMHO—so tapers are turned by loosening the set screw to rotating the headstock at the desired angle. I made my 1911 trigger work fixture on this machine, including the tapered roller set that compensates for parallelism error in the sear and hammer pin holes that may be in a frame. Over time I turned knobs and firing pins and even a special drop tube for my Dillon Square Deal. I milled sight dovetails in small pistol slides. I made a shell holder adapter for a Lee Load-all to take shortened shells, and made a number small tools, lamp housings, heat sinks and other items. Everything took awhile on it because it can't make deep cuts, but, with patience, I got a lot done on it before I could afford full size, full feature machinery or a place with enough room to keep them in.

The knobs have 20 graduations per rotation and the feed threads are one millimeter per turn (these were made in Austria, and so are metric), so each graduation is very close to 0.002" (0.0019685" and change), but close enough to two thousandths that you can use them. The machine is not very rigid, so you constantly recheck your turning work with a micrometer anyway. The dial indicators are another approach to take.

One thing I did with mine was get some bushing bronze and turn anti-backlash screws for it. Backlash is significant in mine, partly from a lot of wear and tear.

It is, indeed, a good way to learn machining principles. Use that owner's manual to learn some of its special setups, like how to realign the headstock with the tailstock and dead center after moving it to turn a taper or for the milling setup.
 
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