oil

[I.M. OUTAHEREParticipant @i-m-outahere]

Hi Mathew,

all the books noted so far are all excellent choices but it can be difficult to gauge your level of experience on the lathe .

some books will start you off with the very basics and work their way through to more complex set ups ,others will assume you know the basics and take you from there to making some tooling etc .

So after a rummage through my library and a look at some of the books i have read i will list what i think i would recommend to a person who has only a very basic understanding of lathe work through to some one that has had some time on a machine , i won't place Model Engineering a foundation course in this list as it offers much more than just lathe work .

1- The amateurs lathe – LH Sparey – this is on e of the best books written on lathe work ever !

2- how to run a lathe – south bend – been around for a million years and once you get past the pictures of their machines it does have a lot of useful information although some of the pictures are quite old in my copy there were newer versions printed .

3- The compact lathe – Stan Bray – this is also an excellent book and fairly comprehensive but is more aimed at very small lathes like a sherline , taig or toyo which may not have screw cutting abilities so i found it a bit wanting in that regard but none the less still a damned good book.

4- Lathe work a complete course – Harold Hall- if you have had a bit of a go on the lathe and want to improve your skills and make some excellent additions to your tool box this is also a fine book , it is part of the workshop practice series (available through this website i think ?) along with many other books in the series- a veritable library of knowledge you will find in the Workshop Practice Series .

Ok so now for Metalworking a foundation course – Peter Wright – i feel that anyone starting out or moderately experienced in model engineering or just general plain metal work will find this book extremely useful , sure if you have been doing this sort of thing for 40+ yrs you may know everything that is in this book but for model engineers i feel this book to be one of the best ever printed and covers a wide variety of topics not just lathework.

cutting oil : i use the following .

Aluminium – all operations -any WD type spray or tap magic , if you want to use a brush to apply just spray some in a small tin .

cast iron , brass , bronze – cut dry no cutting oil .

steel – i usually use tap magic but it is costly , i have a lot of old unmixed soluable oil that i pilfered from somewhere , i use it neat but it smokes like crazy and stinks even worse but works well when tapping . the stuff that Neil uses sounds pretty good to me .

Ian

[Douglas JohnstonParticipant @douglasjohnston98463]

I'm with Neil on this one, I started with soluble oil many moons ago and got bad staining of the bed under the felt wipers and the stuff had an unpleasant smell. I then changed to neat cutting oil in a bottle with an extended dropper type spout and have never looked back. I bought a 5 litre container from Chronos over ten years ago and still have some left, so it is very economical to use.

Mention was made of neat cutting oil being horrible to use, but I have never found this to be the case. The stuff I use keeps the machine rust free and does not leave any sticky residue and does not have an unpleasant smell. I, however, would not use vegetable oil as this can leave sticky residue .

Doug

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