Stealth Pilot wrote:
Kyle gets the mini lathe home and then what???

btw "Kyle" in this context is just a name for any one of us.

OK you get your mini lathe home then what?
first thing you discover is that it just sits there inert on the
bench.
then you start wondering just how you go about actually making
anything on the lathe. after all it just spins stuff around and you
have to wind the knobs.

it doesnt take long for you to totally disbelieve the comment that the
lathe is the king of tools. (it is btw but only after you know how to
use it)

what you need to do is spend the next few nights in the workshop (oh
it probably isnt one of those yet so you'll just be working in the
shed with all the gardening tools, or in a back room) what you've got
to do is to look at the lathe, play with it a bit, oil it, play with
it a bit more and cogitate.

what you wont realise until later is that you have embarked on a
change in the way you are going to think about everything around you.
instead of looking at a widget as something that you buy in harbour
freight your transformation process will lead you to seeing everything
as assemblies of parts. each part being made from materials by a
sequential set of steps which does the michaelangelo thing to the raw
materials eventually generating swarf, a bin full of mistakes, and
some usable parts.

oh michaelangelo... was once asked how he carved a statue.' I look at
the block of stone and see in my minds eye a statue, then I carve away
everything that isnt the statue.' it really is that simple
...eventually.

when you finally understand the use of your lathe you will find that
you look at something like a pratt and whitney(sp?) radial engine as
just a thousand bits made by sequential processes.
making one just requires you to draw out all the sizes on paper or in
a CAD program to make sure they will all work together, and then pick
the most interesting bit, get the materials together and then work out
which is the first step and most importantly of all, actually get
started.

for a doodle around project as your first bit of machining I might
suggest making yourself 3 little plumb bobs. you need about 8ft of
string on each one.
you can make them quite easily to a better quality than you can buy
them.
once you've made them you hang one off the leading edge of your wing
on each side of the aircraft about a foot out from the side of the
fuselage. run a piece of masking tape acoss the floor between the
plumb bobs then draw an accurate pencil line between the plumb bobs.
that is the datum.
leave one plumb bob in place so you can check that the aircraft hasnt
moved.
you then hang one off the centre of the firewall. you hang the third
one under the tail. masking tape and pencil line between the two plumb
bobs and you have the centreline of the aircraft.
being a resourceful guy I'll let you work out the rest of the details
in redoing your aircraft weight and balance. it isnt hard and doing
the job with 3 plumb bobs you've made yourself is quite neat. :-)

like the zen monk that I am I've told you everything and yet I've told
you nothing.
the process of understanding how to make stuff on your lathe will take
a while. making mistakes is an essential part of the process. be
patient, be persistent and ask questions when you get stuck.

Stealth Pilot (who spent the day making patterns and reconditioning
his casting green sand in readiness for the day of propeller melting
that is coming up soon.)



http://lineymachine.googlepages.com/ and companies like that sell
plans and kits for steam engines. Some are very simple and all can be
built from basic stock without castings. If nothing else they are
confidence building exercises for beginners. Liney assumes you have a
basic understanding how lathe and mills work. There are videos on
youtube that show one how to do basic work. Sherline has a page on how
to sharpen lathe tools.

I do suggest modifying a trash bag to cover the machine when not in
use. If one isn't going to use it for awhile the lathe will serve as a
dust magnet.

One of my pet peeves about many homebuilt aircraft I have seen there
are rows of identical toggle switches. One could make knobs for them
with different shapes to provide tactile cues. It's cheaper than buying
such switches.

Dan, U.S. Air Force, retired