Milling in the lathe – Vertical slide

[Chris12Participant @chris12]

Thanks a lot for taking the time to do a video ! that’s a pretty neat setup, and the lathe seems to handle it pretty well !

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

The electronic variable speed lathes as well as the mills need treating in the right way and they are then quite capable. If you try and apply methods based on heavy old iron with belt or gear speed ranges they are not a t their best with the slow heavy cuts. better to run them reasonably fast and take a lesser cut which gets the job done in a similar time as you are feeding a lot faster.

I’m not sure you will have much luck finding a slotted cross slide for that size machine, looking around at similar from Warco, Amadeal and Optimum they all seem to have the same arrangement that you show though none of them have a really good photo of the cross slide.

[PeteParticipant @pete41194]

Thanks for running those test cuts Jason. And for a few reasons, you weren’t using the most optimized set up. But I’m not surprised at all. So a bit better is quite possible. And “any mill is better than any milling attachment” isn’t quite true, because your depths of cut were a whole lot deeper than my first Emco C5 sized mill was even close to being capable of cutting steel.

[JasonBModerator @jasonb]

Before I took the slide off I took a couple more photos

This one shows that it should be possible to use the existing studs to mount the slide sufficiently so that it can be used to drill & Conterbore either a plain plate or the tee slotted one.

And another example wher “any mill” is not going to be better than a milling attachment. If you want to drill or mill the end of a long bar that simply won’t fit under the spindle of your mill then a vert slide will usually accommodate a long part.

Though if the part is not too thick that it can’t go into a toolpost then long items cam also be held in that

And before a clever dick comments the vert slide photos taken today are mocked up. The finger tight single fixings are not enough to actually hold the slide or parts if they were going to be machined.

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