My Tormach Vertical Lathe

[Scott_M]

Hi Guys

It has been a while since I have posted. Sorry for my absence.

With all the Fanfare for the Duality Lathe option I thought I would offer another option. For very little investment you can make a tool holder and use your mill as a vertical lathe with indexable tooling. I made my tool holder in a few hours. Well worth the time. Here is the long and short of it.

Work is held in the spindle , Tools in the tool holder.


Drawbacks
R8 spindle, anything over 1" needs a chucking lug.
no center support , short overall lengths.
no CAM support, you'll have to write the code yourself ( Or do some fancy editing )
Here is a picture of the Tool holder.
The toll holder is 2"x 2"x 11" Mild Steel


To make programing easier I used a different work offset for each tool. I bored the tool holder with three 3/4" bores so I could use my Tormach Tooling. The ER 20 collets will hold anything up to a 1/2". With a spot drill , a drill and a boring bar you could do just about anything. But I added an extra hole anyway. The Spot drill has a place all its own.
In the following Video I am making 4 collars for a product I sell. The material is 1018 mild steel 5/8" dia.
OP 1 Face and turn ( Chamfers are done here with the turning tool )
OP 2 Spot drill
OP 3 drill ( Deep hole 2.3" )
OP 4 ream to size ( reamed to 2.1" deep )
OP 5 Cut Off

LINK TO VIDEO

This is the only job I have used this for yet. But I did build in some room for expansion. With 2.5" between tools I can swing Nearly a 5" work piece.

I milled a small flat on the tool holder ( Weldon style ) and have a 3/8" Flat point set screw to clamp it down.



Food for thought guys .... Let me know what you think.


Scott

[fastlanecafe]

A nice practical solution- it would not be too hard to build an R-8 mounted 3 jaw chuck for the spindle and put some vertical slots in the tool holder and you could face off parts as well. Seems easier and less complicated than manhandling an entire lathe onto the bed for those odd turning jobs.

[300sniper]

i messed around with this idea a few weeks ago also. i just did some simple turning with a turning tool in the vice. it worked fine and the finish was great. i had a similar tool holder in mind but a different shape.

a few days later i had to make a few very simple turned parts to fix my lathe. with the lathe being down, i used the tormach to make them.

[tikka308]

Scott - looking great. Thanks for taking the time to post the video!

[MichaelHenry]

That's very neat - did you hand code the program or use CAM? How hard was it to get the profiling and parting tools aligned?

Mike

[Scott_M]

Hi Mike

I wrote the code by hand. It really is pretty straight forward. I use NCPlot for editing and back plotting. And it was pretty confusing at first because the "Displayed toolpath" is upside down and bacKwards. It was really hard to get my head around it at first and then I realized Its not a toolpath it is a "Workpath" After that little Epiphany I was good.

The reason I went with different work offsets for each tool was to simplify writing code. Each tool has a measured X0 Y0 then I face off the first part and Z zero G54 then move the work to each offset and set Z0. So getting the different tools to line up was real easy. The entire program is only about 70 lines of code.


Scott

[PEU]

Very nice, thanks for sharing!

[twocik]

Any pictures of the final part ?


Love to see more video.

[Scott_M]

Here are some pics of the final parts. There are 2 kinds. The only difference is 1 has a reamed hole and the other is just drilled.

These are some of the set up parts.



And here are the parts.




Scott

[tikka308]

wow! i'm impressed - you're making a lot of these...

[twocik]

That looks really good ! What are they for ?

[zephyr9900]

Gang tooling! Scott, that seriously wins. How do you do your initial centering of the workpiece to the tools?

I've been holding off selling my Sherline CNC lathe until I get my "new" Feeler CNC-retrofitted, but you've just obsoleted the Sherline for what I still need it for...

Best regards,

Randy