Using a cnc Mill as a Lathe

[MSFAB]

Thought I would share this video. I had too make a lot of these steel parts and I didn't have a cnc lathe. So i made a fixture to hold my lathe tooling. I held the part in the spindle and went to town. I had some coolant problems in this video. This was my first test.



Enjoy
Marcus

[fizzissist]

Many years ago I had a car with a different brand of motor...and the fan blades were kissing the underside of the upper radiator hose.

Made a hub on the lathe to mount the fan, then mounted it with the fan in the Bridgeport, and turned down the fan about an inch by using the mill as a lathe.

Gawd it was noisy. And tedious. But it worked.

Always like the idea that using the CNC mill as a lathe really lent itself to gang tooling, and if you made a tooling base plate to drop in different tools so that once indicated in, you could easily run a job that needed complex contours you didn't have a CNC lathe for.

One suggestion....make a manifold that can sit on the table and direct the coolant hoses upwards, with a valve on each to turn them on as needed, but you can leave them in place for production runs.