Warco gear head lathe feeds

[makarijeParticipant @makarije]

Recently I have become an owner of a Warco GH1230 lathe.

On the first use I have attempted to shift through the power feed speeds, but the things didn’t make sense as shifting through the gears would increase the feed and then on the next shift to the higher gear would decrease it.

Since I have used an industrial lathe in the past I was expecting that shifting through the power feed gears will result in incremental increase in feed speeds, but that was not the case.

The lathe has a small table of metric pitches that will cut, which does not cover the whole range.

I have searched online and through the Warco, Grizzly, Precision Mathews etc manuals for the power feeds table that covers all the speeds, but no luck. As far as I know most of Warco models use the same feeds gearbox, as well as other clones.

Thus I have ended up measuring every feed speed in order to figure out what to use.

Warco lathe has a number of dials to set power feed speeds/threads:
– Thread/feed dial (5x reduction for feeds)
– Direction dial (left, right, neutral)
– Multiplication dial with two positions I and II (2x increase, eg: 0.5mm -> 1.0mm)
– Dial 1 five speeds – A, B, C, D, E
– Dial 2 five speeds – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

That means that I only had to iterate through the Dial 1 and Dial 2 and would be able to figure out all else. Possibly I would have been able to extrapolate all from the existing table, but I wanted to be sure.

I have plotted the result into a chart which indicates to me that in order to get the the most effective feeds shifts with minimum of shifting through the gears is to use the following positions D1 to A1 and D2 to A2

Feeds at  M1 dial (x2 at MII dial, x5 for threads at M1 dial, x10 for threads at MII dial)

Dial    1    2    3    4    5
A    0.086    0.15    0.1332    0.12    0.1
B    0.071    0.125    0.1114    0.1    0.0834
C    0.064    0.1124    0.1    0.09    0.074
D    0.0568    0.1    0.088    0.08    0.066
E    0.1    0.175    0.155    0.14    0.1164

 

This has clarified the feed speeds for me and have added another item on the list of don’t likes.

Google spreadsheet: here

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