Lathes and so forth.

Ahem!

Charles

Rob Hi,

That is one of the most difficult questions to answer and is up there along with "how long is a piece of string". The difficulty in finding good used machines at reasonable prices particularly now in the days of E-bay is the main reason why, as a fan of "good old iron" I, I have often advised new import machinery to someone beginning in the interest. In my own workshop that has taken me 25 years to collect I have a mixture of both new and secondhand.

I personally have not had much success with the major dealers, not that their machines were bad in all cases just that I'm too tight to pay the premium they seem to think is deserved on good old machinery. Many have had success with approaching their local education authority about clearance machines from schools etc but, again it didn't work for me. I have watched the local papers for years traveled thousands of miles and in the end bought nothing any good. The four, in my opinion excellent secondhand machines I currently have were obtained by doing what you are now, using the internet. The first was obtained privately after seeing it on E-bay, the second and third from contacts made on this site and the latest from a lead on the

Rob, have you any more details on what type of machine you need, I see in one post you mention a Colchester but that is a very different beast from the CL500M. Is large capacity important to you and do you have room for a fairly large footprint machine. A few more details on your important criteria and of course any budget you might have would help in suggesting suitable machines and possible sources.

To return to frivolity, and answer your specific question the best place in the whole world to buy secondhand machines is "South Wales" and the best source by far me, Me, ME.

Joking apart, (and it is a joke as from what you have said my machines would be too small for you) if you can let us know the minimum spec you would be looking for then we can at least give you a list of the types of "old iron" that might be worth looking for. The same information would help in suggesting alternative new machines to look as well.

Charles, you beat me to it, nice Kerry.

Best regards

Keith

Well I want to build a black 5. Or rather start off with a simplex. Is a Miller a really essential. By the sound of the milling attachment for a Lathe is not very practical. I am open to all suggestions though. I must be honest that I don't sit comfortably with second hand as you don;t know what monkey has been using it before you. As you said, buying second hand is base don luck and a mate who know's what he's doing.

Cheers,

Rob.

Hugh -

Since you ask...I looked at the lathes section on the Grizzly site and picked the 7X12 at random, which Arc sell as the C3 (may be not identical, but pretty close). Its a very common machine so seemed like a reasonable one to compare.

Grizzly 7 X 12 minilathe - $525 according to their website.

Arc Eurotrade C3 - £335 according to their website.

Arc price includes VAT; remove the VAT and multiply by the current exchange rate (2 Dollars to the £) and you get $570 - that sounds like $42 difference, which is £22.5.

Hardly a factor of 2 difference. More like a shade under 7%. Big deal.

Regards, Tony

Tony!!

What you really need to be doing is giving me a few pointers on that X3 mill you have (BG). I'm looking to replace a RF25 that I've sold and the X3 seems popular. I would be using it as a manual machine as I'm not (yet?) into this CNC business. The (yet?) gives a clue that I might be tempted. What is the X3 like to use? I'm looking for a smaller machine to compliment that blasted great Bridgeport I got from JS so it doesn't need to be capable of hogging of huge amounts in one go but I would like it to be reliable, accurate and stable. Any thoughts?

Best regards

Keith

Rob, I'm sorry to say that as I'm not a train man this leaves me in the dark as to what size and capability you would need so any specific machine advice might not be reasonable. Based on what people seem to have, if you are going to build in 5" gauge then I suppose something the size of a Myford 7 series is about it. I'm not sure of the wheel size on the Black Five so for a machine without a gap bed it might need to be bigger. To give anyone a chance to give you reasonable advice a little detail on your proposed budget, any space limitations or engineering background you have would be helpful. This might seem silly when you are asking about new machines but, in reality, cheap import machines (some more than others) will require adjustment and some TLC to get them and as importantly keep them working well.

On the secondhand front I'm not going to say much as I will be accused of doing what I have complained about, but a Myford 7 or Boxford AUD would be ideal and good examples of both are easily available.

In my opinion, for these proects you will need some form of milling capability. In the past much has been done with a vertical slide on the lathe but a stand alone mill will be a great benefit. To be honest, you could get a basic lathe and a small mill for not much more than the cost of the CL500M. Although that as a lathe has a larger capacity than most of that footprint, if you are going on to build a Black Five I think you will find its basic nature a bit limiting and at times frustrating.

Regards

Keith

Not qualified to say how it is like to use it as a manual machine, as the first thing I did with mine was to convert it to CNC so I have never used it as a manual machine. Dick Stephen wrote a review of it a while back in MEW before he converted his - that might be of help. It was before the series he wrote on converting it to CNC, which started in issue 102 I believe.

Well it has been all of those for me so far. The only real complaint I have had is that the geared head is noisy - I have fitted a partial toothed belt drive in place of a couple of the gears, which improves it considerably in that department, but I would like to convert it to entirely belt drive in due course. Dick completely replaced the head on his with a DC variable speed motor & fixed spindle - he figured there was no reall need for a quill on a CNC machine if you are driving the whole of the head up & down anyway. I don't plan to go quite that far but losing the remaining gears would be no hardship!

As a smallish machine to compliment a Bridgie, I would think it has a lot to offer. For me it is the other way around - it is the larger of the two mills I use - my Taig is great for smaller work and where high spindle speeds are needed; the X3 gives me a bit more capacity.

On the CNC conversion front, it is one of a small number of machines of that size that lend themselves fairly readily to conversion because of the dovetail Z axis. You really want to avoid round column mills, or CNC-ing the quill, for that matter. Also, it is big enough to take decent sized ballscrews under the X and Y axes, so that aspect of conversion is pretty straightforward.

Regards, Tony

Tony

Thanks for your comments they are really helpful. I hadn't remembered the Dick Stephen article but I will dig it out tonight for some bedtime reading, sad or what? Although it might seem strange as I have the Bridgie squealing away in the day the noise level is important to me. I have a bit of trouble sleeping these days and I wouldn't want to wake the neighbours at 3am or more importantly for my life and limb, my very own "Gert". I'll see if I can get to hear one running at one of the shows but it's difficult to judge from a busy show venue.

I had hoped that it might be suitable for later conversion to CNC as while I am currently a ludite I can see the challenge of another learning experience will be unavoidable in the future. By then of course, you fine chaps will have sorted out all of the issues for us later developers.

Anyway, thanks again Tony for your comments they really are useful to me.

Best regards

Keith

I think the biggest Achilles heel of the X3 is both the gear noise and the relatively low speed of 2200. The Super X 3 doesn't suffer from gear noise being a belt driven model but it's even more crippled by only having a top speed of 1750 rpm which is useless for most small cutter jobs. Only having the one speed is a trade off against speed and torque, a battle that can never be won at present. Gearing, whether by belts or gears does increase torque and this is what is needed at low revs.

Having said this the X3 lends itself more to mods than the SX3, true the SX3 has a tilt head but that can easily be addressed on the X3. I have a prototype running at the moment with tilt head that only requires two holes to be drilled and tapped and the conversion can be fitted in under 1/2 an hour with no machining or other mods other than these two holes.

Dick's mod of fitting a new head is fine for the work that Dick does. He requires a high speed head for small cutters in clock work and this will do it. However it won't hog big lumps off with a 12mm cutter and some people need to do both.

Other mods are also in the works but so far only on paper or in their early stages.

-- Regards,

John Stevenson Nottingham, England.

Visit the new Model Engineering adverts page at:-

No, I cant see the problem either. Unless people here are loosing out to the competition , that is.

I've been lurking here for what seems like years, and Im sort of supprised at the outburst. Seems a little odd to me. I say good luck to the guy. Business is business. Oh. Of couse, its the British way, isnt it.

AC

Yes - the max spindle speed is on the low side for a small mill. In my case, its not so much of an issue as I can use the Taig when I need high spindle speeds - and could probably strap the Taig's motor and spindle onto the X3 head at a pinch if I needed high spindle speeds as well as the larger table.

Regards, Tony

On or around Mon, 30 Apr 2007 10:17:37 +0100, Tony Jeffree enlightened us thusly:

I bought my lathe second-hand off ebay. There's no way I could afford the new price of anything anywhere near the original quality of this one.

I think there's a lot of ranting about not a lot going on. The only thing I'm going to add is that if anyone is posting about their own stuff for sale, they should be up front about it and make sure that it's obvious that they have an interest.

On or around Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:59:42 +0100, Robert Wilson enlightened us thusly:

depends on how much you pay and what you're like at bodging things. Check out prices of new things carefully, so that you're not paying over the odds. But for example, I have as I said somewhere a 1960 colchester student. The same size and quality machine bought new now would cost more than I make in a year. Mine cost 360 quid, and I've since replaced the motor and the starter switch. One day I'll get around to getting and modifying a cross-slide nut (second hand, new nut and screw cost more than I paid for the machine) so that it can be adjusted like the newer ones to remove backlash from it. But I can work around the play in the crossfeed, most of the time, so it's not a huge priority.