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Gingery Lathe and Accessories

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vtsteam:

--- Quote ---Any chance of a pictures of your Gingery lathe/mill in different setups? I bought the books long time ago and considered giving it a go, but then I got more work than time and tradeoff was to buy a lathe. I liked the approach of using the machine itself to make parts to the machine. I see that you have taken that approach and modularity to next level.

Pekka
--- End quote ---

Pekka and others have asked for more info on the David Gingery designed lathe I built back in 2002-3. I made several accessories for it after I built the lathe itself, including a very versatile milling attachment of my own design, and I documented a lot of this in photos at the time. I've never posted a lot of it, so I'll do that here as I can over the next week or so.

Background: The lathe was the first machine work I ever did. I was not a machinist at the time I decided to build it. I had simply bought Dave Gingery's charcoal furnace book out of curiosity, and then needed to have a reason to build the furnace -- so bought the lathe book . I learned everything by doing it, following the instructions in the Gingery books.

In fact I knew so little when I started that, I didn't really know how all the parts would fit together, or what they were. I simply followed instructions in building each, and once I had a finished piece in hand, I could see how it would fit with the others. Building this lathe was probably one of the most rewarding experiences of my life, it led to much much more.

Here is a picture of the finished lathe with some of the patterns I made for casting the parts.

vtsteam:
It all started with the furnace. The materials for building it were a Christmas popcorn tin, a piece of galvanized sheet wrapped around plywood disks as an inner form, a stainless stel canister and utensil set (to be used as a crucible and skimmers). The tin and stainless items purchased for a total of $15 at a local discount store. Also shown are some wooden spacers for ramming up the mold, a section of aluminum tube for a tuyere form, and a built up lid of sheet metal to be used as a form. I placed inside the original Christmas tin lid to give it the right diameter to fir the main body.

vtsteam:
Here is the furnace lining being rammed up. The lining was fireclay and sand, with a little perlite mixed in.

vtsteam:
The lining and lid rammed up. I put a couple sheet strap "ears" in the lid to attach a bail type wire handle. there were large nails through  the ears in the refractory to help anchor them.

vtsteam:
Here is the pattern and mold for the lathe way bed casting -- one of the more difficult in the entire project. It is the largest casting, and has sand cores where the slots are. These need draft in the pattern, which is difficult to form. In addition it is one of the thinnest castings, so is hard to pour without cold shorting. I anticipated this problem and poured the metal a little hot, so my casting came out fine, first time.

Many people think the Gingery lathes are all aluminum. They aren't. This aluminum casting supports the lathe ways, which are a slab of cold rolled steel plate. Both the bed and the actual ways are hand scraped to a true straightedge using machinist blue (or artist's oil Prussian blue) and a scraper made form a file. It takes many hours to hand scrape all of the parts on this lathe. It took about 8 hours of work to scrape this bed and the steel ways. I used a brand new high quality carpenters 4' level as my straightedge, when checking the lathe parts for truth.

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