Greetings to the established members, new joiner here but not to engineering.

i have recently re-jigged my garage workshop around and reinvigorated my interest in making things. I’m prevaricating on building a stationary engine but like knocking stuff up and prototype a few things and make some tools and jigs for my buddy.

I have a new to me Cyclematic ctl 618 lathe replacing a Myford super 7, Warco VMC milling machine, small drill press, grinder, linisher and all the associated bits and pieces. My late father also willed me his workshop so I have the use of the equipment but not the skills for wood turning, thickness into, bandsawing and routing.

I work 2 month rotations as a yacht engineer and during my time away from work would like to join the discussions on various subjects to keep my mind in the game as it were.

I quite like the idea of 3D printing and wouldn’t mind dipping my toe in the water if I could decide on projects to make.

I look forward to chatting with you in due course.

Al

I must say I like it a lot; I’m not home until the end of July to post any pics but the work I’ve done on it so far makes life much easier.

For any that might be interested, it’s a Taiwanese clone of a Hardinge HLV-H, that has a 2 speed continuously variable spindle and a separate feed motor so that you can vary feed or surfacing whilst cutting. The work envelope isn’t huge but it’s plenty for myself and I have use of a Colchester Master 2500 if needed.

The cutting tool retract isn’t something I’ve used when screwcutting so far, as I always cut with the compound parallel to the bed so I can add sidecut. The more useful feature regarding threading apart from the Imperial/metric gearbox is the auto drop out of the feed when threading to a shoulder and not needing to wait for thread dial to come around as when you re-engage the feed the single tooth clutch picks the same point. This means that you can thread at a far higher speed, notionally according to the manual up to 1000 rpm.