No, I looked. A new lightweight aluminium head made most of the old machines compliant. A lot of tooling needed to be replaced, but not it seems many machines.
Besides which, I'd only get stuck with the cost of upgrading it myself.
Axminster used to do one - like a light spindle moulder, but with a collet (usually 3/4" or 1") rather than a spindle for a head. They're OK with big shank-mounted tooling as a light spindle, but they didn't go more than about 6,000 rpm and so weren't useful as a router substitute for small diameter tooling.
Actually, I suppose thinking about it, most of the mass would be in the tooling. I have some steel and some aluminium tools, and it is noticable that it takes a second or so longer for the electronic braking to stop a large steel slotting cutter that I have, whether it's used on the spindle moulder or the saw arbor.
Is the implication of a migration to aluminium tools that there are used steel ones on the market? I guess that a lot wouldn't have provision for limiters though, and presumably the bore is some imperial size?
Although the cost of electronic VFDs has come down a lot and makes it possible to use a 3 phase machine into the bargain.
Hmmm..... seems like something that falls between stools. I can't say that I've seen tooling for this type of machine.
Not on the over-the-counter market. The head change was popular because PUWER also needed a change to pin-retained knives and cut limiters too. Swapping heads fixed all 3 problems and didn't even need a sparkie. It's illegal to sell old heads without retention, even if you were fitting them to a braked machine.
30mm bore stuff has been around a long time and imperial bores are still supported on modern heads.
They still seem quite expensive, even at the low end. I've been buying VFDs for over 15 years and from the first ones which cost several grand and were >100hp they've dropped in price, but there still doesn't seem to be much that's "cheap" at the low end to simply avoid swapping motors on 3 phase kit going into single phase shops. Surely it can't be that expensive to build a basic inverter as an add-on unit for this, but the price is still much more than a motor swap.
And as for the rip-off pricing of the very crudest sorts of DC injection brake!
To digress a little, I see that the Poolewood VFD lathe is back again under the "Silverdrive" name (apparently the people who always made them). Shame the colour has gone so ugly though
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I'm often making Mission / Craftsman stuff. I have a hard job getting as good ray flake figure out of English oaks as they do out of Q. alba.
Now what should I do with 20' of 20" wide good new elm boards ? Thick enough to make tables, too thin to make Windsor chair bases.
That figures. I'm surprised in a way that people would happily migrate from steel to aluminium blocks.
I have some tools of each - e.g. slotting and rebate cutters in steel and then one size of Whitehill-style block in aluminium and a different size in steel. I haven't been disappointed with the aluminium tools, although I don't do industrial production runs. Perhaps it isn't as big an issue as is sometimes claimed.
I've seen adaptor sleeves to convert 30mm to larger sizes, but would feel nervous about the whole thing sticking together. I can get imperial size spindle assemblies for the spindle moulder, but there would only seem a point if I wanted to buy tooling in the U.S. Since I can get 30mm everything (as far as I can tell) here, then no point. There isn't a huge price difference as there is on some tools.
I was just comparing some in old and recent catalogues and there seemed to be about a 30% drop over the last couple of years. I have a 4kW Lenze drive in my machine and this power level seems to be priced at around £500. A similar rated 3ph motor (I just looked at ABB ones in the RS catalogue) is just over half that. Obviously if you have multiple motors it's different, and there is the advantage of the speed control.
That is indeed silly....
control aspects but this does make sense.
I'm thinking about a lathe in the coming months. What would be your suggestion on things to look for? I'm not looking for a toy for pen turning, but equally not an industrial monster.
I like these styles as well - functional with just enough design appeal while not being fussy.
Quercus Rubra seems to be more popular in the US for these, but I suspect that that is because it's cheaper than the white. I'm told that it has poorer shrinkage properties as well.
Hmmm..... That certainly needs careful thought....
Haven't a clue - I'm no turner. I don't even have a lathe, I use the one I bought my Dad a few years ago (yellow Axminster) That's quite a useful piece of kit and _very_ cheap, although I'd go for the long-bed model if I were buying again.
It really depends what you're doing. I'm mainly interested in spindle turning for furniture which makes hardly any demands on the lathe and needs very few tools. If you're doing bowls it's much more complex. You start to care far more about rigidity for one thing - spindle turning just doesn't wobble enough to care.
So long as it has a variable speed head, and a standard thread on the nose then I'm happy. The rest you can fix with a stick welder (like 3' long toolrests etc.) I'm even thinking about building a Conover style lathe from scratch, with a couple of oak beams for the bed and welded steel end stands.
It's more popular generally (price) but not for Mission that has any real attempt at quality because it just never looks right. I make a point of using locally felled timber, so mine is mainly Q. robur. I get some Welsh Q. petraea too, but they're hard to tell apart as boards.
Clear enough. I guess that a table leg would be one of the longest items. I've seen things like bed posts etc. produced in sections and fitted together afterwards.
That all makes sense.
I hadn't thought in detail yet. It was more a case of not going for something that turned out (oh dear) to be just slightly too small for an obvious operation. OTOH, I don't want to use too much space on a monster.
Paler wood, then treated etc. ?
Very good. So much that is available is classified just as "European Oak" and that seems to relate to a variety of things from here to the Urals.
It won't ammonia fume (it goes greenish) and so you have to get the Mission dark look by staining it anyway. The grain is coarser though, the ray flake is poor and the end grain is ugly with big pores in it.
OTOH, Japanese red oak is quite a nice timber and takes a lovely surface polish. I've got lots of hand tools made of it.
It's the name for sessile oak (Q. robur is also called pedunculate oak). They're easy to tell apart as trees - pedunculate or common oak has its acorns on stalks (peduncles) not sitting flush on the branch. It also has leaves with auricles on them - a pair of little "earlobes" near the stalk end, but the leaves barely have stalks.
Sessile oak (Q. petraea) has sessile acorns sitting flush, but the leaves have long stalks and they grow out of the stalk more like a beech leaf. The name literally means "stone oak" and it's also known as the upland oak. It's more tolerant of poor soils so mature trees are usually on hilltops. Modern planting though is pretty much all sessile oak (if you want grants) because it doesn't shoot epicormics as commonly as the common oak (twig-sized branches coming through the trunk). This gives a better quality of timber, even if you don't manage the trees as well and prune the epicormics every couple of years, as you ought.
Red oak (Q. rubra) just doesn't happen in the UK, barring some ornamentals. Of course all oaks will hybridise like crazy, so you're often seeing cross-species - although rarely big enough to fell for timber.
That, as you very well know, (or actually probably you don't) is not the issue. What is actually important is whether or not the product is fit for the intended purpose. Frequency of use is another matter entirely.
Until that criterion is met, any discussion about price and frequency of use is irrelevant.
If usage is infrequent, but a professional quality tool is needed to achieve the required result, then there are two solutions:
- Buy the professional tool and accept that this is part of doing the job properly.
- Rent the tool as and when required.
To suggest that something is acceptable because usage is infrequent, while ignoring outcome is ridiculous.
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