On Feb 9, 11:26*am, Cydrome Leader wrote:
I just got my hands on a sherline 4400 mini-lathe. I know how metal
behaves with a file/saw/hammer- just not with machine tools.

I've been playing with some brass and learned about the drill bit leaving
triangular holes and other non-obvious things. I was able to turn down
some aluminum castings I made, but other than just making random shapes,
I'm somewhat at a loss as to where to get started. There's got to be
defacto books written 1000 years ago I need to grab.

What's suggested around here?

Figure out what you want to do with it. Then get some books and read
up. Clocks, live steam, railroads, engines, gun parts, whatever.
There's specialty magazines and books out there covering all those
areas. B&N usually has The Home Shop Machinist and some of the other
Village Press publications on the magazine racks. There's a number of
books on using small lathes, a lot are British and over-priced for the
information in them, but the ones I have are good, see what you can
turn up on Amazon searching for "Workshop Series". Don't buy them
from Amazon, their associated dealers have much better prices. There's
also The Model Engineer, which a really well-stocked library will have
bound back issues of. It's another British magazine, but had a lot of
articles on making tooling and using small lathes. Also multi-issue
projects, castings for which may still be had, at least for some.

If you need general machining texts, archive.org has a bunch of oldies
for free, "lathe", "machining", "machine shop", maybe "Audels", as
search terms should turn up a bunch of stuff to keep you busy.

Stan