Machinist input on Gunsmith Lathe

Brambles

Brambles

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West Kootenays B.C.
I've been interested in doing this for years, now Im in the market to build a new big $$ rifle but I'm thinking this might be the opportunity to, instead of having a new rifle built, invest in the equipment and learn to do it myself.

Two lathes that peek my interest are

http://www.grizzly.com/products/Gunsmith-s-Bench-Top-Lathe-with-Stand/G4003G

http://www.grizzly.com/products/14-X-40-Gunsmith-s-Gearhead-Lathe/G0709

Reading reviews on the net there are a lot of guys doing some real nice work with these lathes, they are built in ISO shops even though they are made in china.

My question is, is the 14x40 lathe worth the extra $$$ over the 12x36 lathe
about $1300 +/-

Is the bigger lathe gonna do anything the smaller one won't in regards to chambering, threading, contouring, repeatability?


Thanks

Jeff
 
Brambles said:
I've been interested in doing this for years, now Im in the market to build a new big $$ rifle but I'm thinking this might be the opportunity to, instead of having a new rifle built, invest in the equipment and learn to do it myself.

Two lathes that peek my interest are

http://www.grizzly.com/products/Gunsmith-s-Bench-Top-Lathe-with-Stand/G4003G

http://www.grizzly.com/products/14-X-40-Gunsmith-s-Gearhead-Lathe/G0709

Reading reviews on the net there are a lot of guys doing some real nice work with these lathes, they are built in ISO shops even though they are made in china.

My question is, is the 14x40 lathe worth the extra $$$ over the 12x36 lathe
about $1300 +/-

Is the bigger lathe gonna do anything the smaller one won't in regards to chambering, threading, contouring, repeatability?


Thanks

Jeff
Click to expand...

I have 16x42 lathe, paid almost $10 000 for slightly used one in 1992'. I cannot belive how much lathe you can get for $4 000 or so recently. Get the smaller one, it's plenty big enough for gunsmithing unless your future might include intrest in 50cal BMG and then it would propably still suffice.
 
It's gonna be tough to say that the 14 inch lathe will do anything YOU want to do, better, but you can do small work on a large lathe way better than you can do large on a small one.

I'm pretty certain that the day after the lathe was invented, was the day the job came in the door that was too large to fit on it.

All else equal, get the heavier machine. Mass equates, usually, to rigidity. Rigidity is good.

Lots of ISO certified shops making well documented crap, out there. Don't get suckered by that.

You pretty much gotta have a long hard look at your own needs. You may or may not ever use the smaller lathe to it's capacity, and you may need larger than the large lathe right of the start, depending what you end up doing.

One thing that pops out to me, is the lack of Taper Attachments for either one, as an available option. Did I miss something there?

Grizz has a pretty good rep for parts and tech support. Dunno which one is 'best'...

Cheers
Trev
 
No, if you can do it on the 40 you'll be able to do it on the 36.

Technically the bigger machine SHOULD be a little more solid because it weighs another 150 lbs. But in reality you either would never notice or it would only come into play on the rarest of occasions.

The slightly cheaper and more compact 36 inch machine would be all you need. The trick is in setting the machines up correctly on a suitable base and trueing them. Then there's all the tooling and special jigging and fixtures you'll end up making to do the jobs related to gunsmithing.

You realize that this is a whole new hobby that'll suck your soul in just as badly as shooting did? :D

Also you're very much jumping into the deep end of the pool with a rock tied to your ankles in terms of the learning curve. If you do go ahead with this new venture much of the tooling which most folks just buy can actually be made. And the lessons you learn in doing so will really aid you with the actual project of modifying or making rifles later on.

For example here's a picture of some morse taper arbors I made up about 8 or 9 years ago to use with my mill/drill. What doesn't show is that the tapers were made accurately enough that with just the barest of fine tuning with dye, big lathe file and a taper socket that they were able to lock into the quill quite solidly with the lightest of seating pressure.

Doing your own similar tooling and fixtures will be the "on the job" training that lets you learn the skills and engineering knowledge used in machining metal.

By the way, I'm not a "professional" in that I don't make my living using these machines. But I've had a machine shop setup available for most of my life thanks to my father's old shop and for the past 20'ish years my own shop. And I've done lots of stuff over that time considering that it's a hobby. A lot of my early stuff went into my own or a couple of buddys' race cars.

The thing is that since it's a hobby I CAN take the time to do stuff like these arbors. If I were doing it for pay there would be no time to do such things. And the lessons I learned from this experience in terms of setting up tapers and dialing them in and a host of other important lessons would have gone unlearned. So in some ways doing it as a hobby is better than doing it for a living IF you have a high enough set of personal standards to drive you.

Tapers.jpg
 
trevj and BCRider have some of the best advise I've seen and I like to read their comments.
I'm no professional either, but I can make an accurate tackdriver and I made most of my tooling jigs. I think that was half the fun. In essence, I think of machining and gunsmithing as a hobby to me and a fantastic learning curve to last a lifetime.
Bigger is better for me especially for those BMG barrels, but for the average hobbyist the small one will work. It has more tooling than my old South Bend ever had.
I was doing a trigger job on my Rem 788 last night and a small safety plunger went flying as I took it apart. Never could find it, so I made one with my 13x40 lathe from a small screw. Gotta love that especially when parts don't exist anymore. That big ol' 8" chuck held a piece .090 x .200 long, stepped to .050 x .025 long then made a polished radiused tip for the safety detent.
Truth is the average guy would have to buy a Timney or have a gun that won't function until repaired.
Ether way, the lathe is only a step. Next comes the tooling and learning how to use it and sharpen bits for the job at hand.
 
Thanks for the great feedback guys.

Right now my only reason for purchasing a lathe is gunsmithing, I can't ever see the need to turn a barrel longer than 36 inches or anything bigger in diameter than 12".

Although its only $1300, which right now is a good chunk of change for me since I just finished building my house. It is almost a 50% increase over the smaller lathe. Thats a lot of tooling, or barrels, reamers, guages etc etc.

I hear what your saying about the learning curve and learning how to use it, but if yah aint got it, you can't learn on it. So sooner or later you just gotta jump in with both feet and learn.

And as far as the Taper attachments that Trevj was talking about, at this point thats all greek to me so I"ll have to bow to the experiance of the others.
 
Unless you are making large size model cannons, the only advantage I can see to the bigger lathe is the longer bed. Even the longer bed is a concern only if you are barreling long barreled single shot rifles with say 32" barrels.
My own lathe is a Myford super 7 with 32" between centers and it is certainly fine for most barreling jobs. Might surprise you, but the thing that I probably use it most for is making screws (I work on antique guns)
I better qualify my comments by saying that I am only a hobby user but I have had my lathe for about 25 years

cheers mooncoon
 
Brambles said:
Thanks for the great feedback guys.

Right now my only reason for purchasing a lathe is gunsmithing, I can't ever see the need to turn a barrel longer than 36 inches or anything bigger in diameter than 12".

Although its only $1300, which right now is a good chunk of change for me since I just finished building my house. It is almost a 50% increase over the smaller lathe. Thats a lot of tooling, or barrels, reamers, guages etc etc.

I hear what your saying about the learning curve and learning how to use it, but if yah aint got it, you can't learn on it. So sooner or later you just gotta jump in with both feet and learn.

And as far as the Taper attachments that Trevj was talking about, at this point thats all greek to me so I"ll have to bow to the experiance of the others.
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The taper attachment allows you to cut a taper as long as the piece that will fit between the chuck and the tailstock in one set up. further you can use the powerfeed for a very consistent finish. If you are going to run HSS tools you need to run coolant or you will burn your bits up in a hurry. If you can, go carbide; you can run higher spindle speeds and cut harder materials. Also with carbide your cut depths are limited only by rigidity and horsepower. I regularly take 1/4 inch cuts on 4" 4140 when making carbide cutting heads. Oh last thing wear you glasses all the time, protect your ears and watch that chuck that f@cker will maim you if you give it half a chance.
 
Two cents, FWIW.

Never wear loose fitting clothes. ;)
Loosely fitting sleeves in particular, can be grabbed by rotating objects such as chucks and boring-heads.
Long hair is dangerous for the same reasons.

NEVER LEAVE THE KEY IN A CHUCK!:p

Have fun making chips Eh!:)
 
should be able to do all you need on the smaller one.check your local business directory.there could be some company that sells used industrial machine shop gear.most trade schools etc renew their equipment on a regular schedule.if you could get one of these machines it might be better than the ones you are looking at.an older southbend or a colchester would be a good investment as long as it is tight.busybee used to carry a lathe/milling machine combo which i thought was kind of cool.not sure how sturdy it was but something similar if still avalible might be of intrest.
 
Do yourself a favor, and buy a few books to start off.

I will give unreserved recommendations for a copy of South Bend Lathes book, How to Run a Lathe. Expect to spend $20 or so. Buy a reprint, rather than an original, as the guys selling originals seem to think 50 years of dogged pages and fingerprints are worth more than new. The info is the same from the 1930's editions to the last edition printed, except maybe for the loss of info on line-shaft set-ups. Lee Valley used to sell a copy. Don't think they do any more. It can be downloaded from a couple places like here http://www.wswells.com/index.html two versions available. Disk space is cheap. So are real books, and they work without electricity.

The second book is a High School/college grade level textbook, often used for shop classes, called Technology of Machine Tools, by Krar. Buy an older used copy. the tech level from the 40's through the 60's is way closer to what you need to know in the shop to get started. The used versions are great books, the new ones have some more current tech covered, CNC, mainly. But they still cover stuff like tool angles, threading, the math involved, etc, pretty damn well. New, about $75 or so, used, much less. Check out Amazon and Abe Books.

Don't bother with Machinery's Handbook unless you can get a copy for under $20. All the data in there is, is the mother of all wall charts, in book form. If you have internet, you can look up anything you can have need for that you will find there, plus some. That said, most of the stuff that you will want to be dealing with, again, is older tech. You probably won't need optimum fed rates for PCD tooling to cut carbon fiber in production settings, so, buy an older edition for less, and get good info still.

Busy Bee sell a couple different machining books that are pretty good, some others that are OK, and a few that are pretty poor.

Good. The Amateur's Workshop, by Sparey, Workholding in the Lathe, and Milling in the Lathe, by Tubal Cain. There are a few others.

Screwcutting in the Lathe, in the same Workshop Practice series, is one you can afford to skip, IMO, as the data is pretty much well covered in other places. Most of the info in the book is charts showing how to cut given threads with different pitch lead screws, which is certainly good to have if the oddball pitch matches one on YOUR machine, but... Anyway, look it over before you drop your money. I wouldn't.

If you make a habit of hitting the used book stores when you are in the city, you can usually build a pretty decent library. Cheap, too.

Get onto the Lindsay Publications site and see about ordering a catalog. Along with the great reprints of metalworking books, they have a few years worth of good general interest reading in there, if you want to broaden your horizons into other practical applications of old school tech. :)

Oh yeah. Welcome to the disease! :D Expect to end up with a fair assortment of tools and tooling to go with the lathe. The usual recommendation is that you need about the cost of the machine in tooling, to be able to do all the things that the machine tool is capable of, but for getting started, you can get by with the basics and build on them as needed.

Oh yeah. Home Shop Machinist magazine is worth a subscription too. Aside from project ideas, some gun related even, they carry advertising from a large amount of the dealers that actually are willing to deal with small time hobby guys. It'll give you a bunch of places to check out, and it's always interesting to see how other guys shops are set up.

KBC Tools will send you a catalog as well. Worth calling them for.


Cheers
Trev
 
Thanks Trev for your posts, takes time to type up something like that and its much appreciated.

I'll have to look through some of boxes, my grandfather is a retired machinest and he's given me all his mic's/guages and some books and odds and ends. One cool looking old machinest book thats gotta be 5" thick. He says the answers to all lifes problems lie within that book if you can find them...lol

He's the one that told me about the Grizzly gunsmith lathes. Unfortunatly he moved to Victoria so he's not around for personal consults.
 
Brambles said:
Thanks Trev for your posts, takes time to type up something like that and its much appreciated.

I'll have to look through some of boxes, my grandfather is a retired machinest and he's given me all his mic's/guages and some books and odds and ends. One cool looking old machinest book thats gotta be 5" thick. He says the answers to all lifes problems lie within that book if you can find them...lol

He's the one that told me about the Grizzly gunsmith lathes. Unfortunatly he moved to Victoria so he's not around for personal consults.
Click to expand...

If you look around you might get a an industrial lathe for almost the same money. If you are planning on making a business the bigger machine is the way to go For a hobby i don't know i have never used a machine with less than a 16' bed. Have fun making stuff is the best job I ever had.
 
Brambles said:
Thanks Trev for your posts, takes time to type up something like that and its much appreciated.

I'll have to look through some of boxes, my grandfather is a retired machinest and he's given me all his mic's/guages and some books and odds and ends. One cool looking old machinest book thats gotta be 5" thick. He says the answers to all lifes problems lie within that book if you can find them...lol

He's the one that told me about the Grizzly gunsmith lathes. Unfortunatly he moved to Victoria so he's not around for personal consults.
Click to expand...

The thick book is probably The Machinery's Handbook and it is an awesome reference for almost any machining or engineering project. There are a lot of versions with continually updated info. It's on the 28th edition now and usually over $100 for a copy.
The older versions still contain just about any information you might need.
 
I picked up my Machinery Handbook on eBay ages ago I think for $20. Since I don't do CNC I didn't need the latest. It's still the final book I go to figure out the most complexing problems.

I've never heard anything bad about the Grizzly Gunsmith versions. Those were designed on purpose by Grizzly management as the owner is a F-Class shooter.
 
trevj said:
Don't bother with Machinery's Handbook unless you can get a copy for under $20.

Screwcutting in the Lathe, in the same Workshop Practice series, is one you can afford to skip, IMO, as the data is pretty much well covered in other places. Most of the info in the book is charts showing how to cut given threads with different pitch lead screws, which is certainly good to have if the oddball pitch matches one on YOUR machine, but...
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I have a second hand Machinery's Handbook and find it very handy to have close by the lathe. I don't use it a lot but it certainly saves going upstairs and poking around on the computer

The only thread pitch not on my lathe is 30 tpi and its multiples. That is only significant for one or two screws on Stevens single shot rifles. The screw cutting feature allows me to make a series of oversize taps for chasing out the threads on things like nipple holes that are often damaged from years of corrosion. It then allows me to make oversize threads to fit the oversize hole

cheers mooncoon
 
mg4201 said:
If you look around you might get a an industrial lathe for almost the same money. If you are planning on making a business the bigger machine is the way to go For a hobby i don't know i have never used a machine with less than a 16' bed. Have fun making stuff is the best job I ever had.
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I feel the biggest problem going with a used lathe and being so green is I won't know if the lathe is wore out or not.

If a guy was to look at an older lathe for gunsmithing what would be something he should keep an eye out for.

How old is too old?
 
Brambles said:
I feel the biggest problem going with a used lathe and being so green is I won't know if the lathe is wore out or not.

If a guy was to look at an older lathe for gunsmithing what would be something he should keep an eye out for.

How old is too old?
Click to expand...

Realisticaly if the lathe has been maintained with oil changes they can last a real long time. Also it depends how the unit was used 1 hour per day or 16 hours a day and was the guy who ran it a hammerhead? or a finesse guy? I have what most people would consider an unhealthy love for machine tools and I treat them really well but not everyone does. And without an experienced guy to look it over for you you could get stuck with a POS. Not all machinists are honest unfortunately. Sorry I couldn't be of more help but I guess the answer is "it depends". Which is a crap answer but the best that I can do.
 
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