On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 00:32:15 -0700, xray
wrote:

On Fri, 07 Apr 2006 07:51:16 +0100, Gary Wooding
wrote:

wrote:
Does anyone have recommendations for books concerning how to threadon a
lathe, and also books on how to make gears on a lathe?

I know that doing the latter on a lathe is not common, but if there are
any books on this subject, I'd appreciated the titles.

Thanks a lot.

Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.


Other than making the basic gear shape (OD and center hole) I can't
think how a lathe would be useful unless you want to make it look like a
mill by putting a tool in the chuck and adding some kind of gear blank
holder / indexer onto the cross slide.
Which of course is how it's done. And this is not unusual. Especially
for small work and work done by model makers and amateur machinists.
Furthermore, extremely high quality work is done this way. In fact,
you really need a lathe to begin making other machine tools. It would
be nice to have separate machines for each function, e.g. turning,
milling, shaping, and grinding. In fact, I have all these machines
because I'm in business making parts for money. But the work put out
by amateurs can be very precise and beautiful. Just because a person's
complete machine shop is located in a closet in the spare bedroom of
their apartment and is dominated by a lathe does not mean that that
lathe won't be useful for every aspect of machining. Basically a lathe
is just a spinning mandrel onto which all sorts of things are hung.
Even though we may say that when the part is spun and the tool is not
that this is lathe work, who's to say that ANY work done on a lathe is
not lathe work? When the part is spun, and the tool, a grinding wheel,
is also spun, does this mean that it is no longer lathe work? Has the
lathe turned into a grinder? Or is now a lathe with a grinding
attachment? The part is still being turned. If the part is sanded on
the lathe then the tool is not spinning. Is it grinding, sanding, or
turning?
Cheers,
eric