replaning lathe beds

Knowing where a service such as this is located is such a helpful piece of information. To me paying 300.00 isn't that bad but if you spend 150.00 to

tim

I approached South Bend a number of years ago about this, and had an interesting conversation with a customer service type. Their approach was to save up lathe beds until they had enough to make it worth their time to set up the grinder for the bed profile. Then they would dress a single stone with the entire shape of the bed across the stone. When they ground a bed with this setup, all surfaces would default to parallel, and be as straight as the bed on the grinder.

It sounded like an absolutely fabulous way to get a straight,parallel bed. I cannot imagine getting that kind of accuracy out of a planer with the operator having to mess around with the knobs to get each surface on the bed at the right angle and spacing.

Brownnsharp

i have used a planer to do lathe bed and bridgeport tables. we removed the planer clapper and mounted grinding heads. we have done several 100 or 1000 bp table and ways with perfect reading. i just do not feel it is worth the work for just one small machine like 9sb. when we do the tables it is four or more unless we have a customer request that does not want an exchange.

I understand that the people who really rebuilding machines consider planing small lathe beds to be nuisance work. My idea would be set up an operation to specialize in it at reasonable rates. The questions which I need to answer are: What is the demand, and what are reasonable rates. Incidentally, a planed bed does not need scraped. It is usually spotted for looks and to hold oil. The only thing which needs scraped is the saddle and that is a simple job. I think it would be necesary to provide saddle scraping as part of the service. A hardened bed can not be planed. My friend would be doing this in his slack time, so he wouldn't need to charge as much as a busy rebuild shop. There are millions of those small lathes out there, but, again, what is the demand and what is a fair price? Paul

i gues you need to figure an hourly rate that you are happy with. then set up a time frame. we charge from $300 to several thousand depending on setup time. can you move the bed around with out help or do you need a hoist. everybed will have a different price. the demand; there are tons of sb lathe that need help, but there is a bunch that are fine selling for cheap. we sold a job,reground and scraped and turcite 9" sb for $1500 that same week i bought one with every tooling sb made for 9" that held perfect tolerences and still had the original markings on the ways $700. if you are good people will come. the other thing is that a mid size althe will take a few hours. we spend a lot of time doing set up we indicate off of different areas that are known to be good. what do you think so far.