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Did Sherline let down - not!

One failing with Sherline - if they have any failings at all - might be the maximum speed of the lathe spindle. While centering a piece of drill rod with one of the sub-sized center drills ( about 3 sizes below #1) I was quite perplexed when all of a sudden, it quit cutting and went to "buzzing". Close examination of the work piece revealed the tip of the center drill broken off and deeply imbedded in the, errr, "center" of the aborted indentation on the drill rod. All this after prescribed "peck drilling" of the center hole. Problem was, the center drill's tiny tip was so small as to require either super delicate pecking or super fast spindle speed. Of course, I had neither. Carbide to the rescue! The offending HSS center pip was conveniently drilled out with my smallest solid carbide drill bit, about

1/8". Mr. Sherline didn't object in any way as carbide chewed away the imbedded HSS center drill tip. Not going too deep with this rescue operation left enough meat to effect proper, and very careful, center drilling of the new "carbidized" spot on work piece. Besides the sloping sides of the rescue hole left a nice oil-retention socket. It almost looked as if it was planned that way.

Bob Swinney

Reply to
Robert Swinney
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That's the reason the old-timers got rid of the tip on small centre drills when they first introduced them to their bench grinder.

Reply to
Mungo Bulge

Sherline will sell you a new set of pulleys that will push the spindle speed to 10k. I tried them out and the motor has barely enough power to get to 10k even after adjusting the bearing pre-load. I was going to play with grinding wheels but didn't need it after all. chuck

Reply to
Chuck Sherwood

Reply to
Robert Swinney

I will do jobs on the sherline that I would not do on my other nice machines because the sherline is MUCH cheaper and easier to replace.

I turned some machinable ceramic on the sherline with a vacuum cleaner running to catch the dust. Better to abuse the sherline than my nice myford that cost so much more.

Reply to
Chuck Sherwood

Does that tell me you do not ordinarily work to the precision that your Sherline is capable, errrrr, used to be, capable of?

Reply to
Robert Swinney

Life is full of choices. Given a choice, I prefer to expose the sherline to possible wear from abrasive dust than my very nice Myford. This way the myford is always ready for precision work.

Reguardless of what machine I use, I do my best to keep the dust off the machine and I clean it up afterwards.

I use to have an OLD craftsman/atlas lathe that I used for cast iron work. I have since replaced it with a very nice rockwell 11 inch lathe and it will bother me to turn CI on it but I guess thats life.

Reply to
Chuck Sherwood

Interesting thought... I wonder if anyone here has actually experienced wear on their machine, based on excessive use in a harsh environment.

At work, we have large radial arm drill presses (roughly 15ft high, perhaps

8ft reach). We're constantly grinding (with disc and die grinders) around them and they've been there for many years. They're still very capable machines, even with their exposed boxways.

I'm not saying I'd want to have my machine exposed to a similar environment, but I wonder if cutting the odd chunk of cast iron would greatly affect the capability of most machine tools...

Regards,

Robin

Reply to
Robin S.

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