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Which are, along with mills, one of the two machines which could be used to make every single part needed to build a new lathe. Although, since people started adding computer-controlled feeds to them, this is not strictly true anymore for most models. The old style manual ones work just fine, though.
A lathe anecdote: The big fat Panda (my dad) owns a car, which is his hobby car. (It is a Packard. It is name Jean-luc. If you got that joke, you are a geek.) As far as I know, the engine is currently on a kind of engine-holding hoist called a cherry picker, ten feet away from the actual car; it's not a working car, it's just for fun. To facilitate the fun, he bought a lathe that was built originally by a company that no longer exists in, like, the twenties. It is old school, but it still works and the manual book was online for anyone with the correct serial number to find. The issue was that it was poorly translated from German by a Chinese translator who knew neither English nor German. And so we get such gems as a chapter entitled, "Der Shleppen and Setting-up of the Machine."
But back to lathes. The reason I am telling you this is because today, in makey-things class, we did some lathing. Lathing and milling are both ways to remove material, and only to remove material - adding is actually really really hard. Instead, you deliberately cast slightly larger than the end part, and then lathe or mill it down to get your exact size. And yes, this does mean the primary purpose of a lathe is to remove metal from a casting. It has very, very sharp tools and a very powerful motor and must be respected, but, dude!
Another lathe anecdote: at one of the fine old tech schools, there used to be a series of machining classes you'd take, which were like grown-up makey-things class. You would start at the beginning with one lathe and some metal bars, and through various castings and lathings and millings, you'd finish at the end with two lathes. The second lathe was the one you built during the course of these classes, starting with the casting of parts and going from there.
Our lathing project is not quite so awesome. Instead, this and next week we are using the lathe and the mill and we are turning our rough cast-aluminum parts into pencil holders. Kind of useless furniture, but cool too, since we made them! :D I <3 makey-things class.
A lathe anecdote: The big fat Panda (my dad) owns a car, which is his hobby car. (It is a Packard. It is name Jean-luc. If you got that joke, you are a geek.) As far as I know, the engine is currently on a kind of engine-holding hoist called a cherry picker, ten feet away from the actual car; it's not a working car, it's just for fun. To facilitate the fun, he bought a lathe that was built originally by a company that no longer exists in, like, the twenties. It is old school, but it still works and the manual book was online for anyone with the correct serial number to find. The issue was that it was poorly translated from German by a Chinese translator who knew neither English nor German. And so we get such gems as a chapter entitled, "Der Shleppen and Setting-up of the Machine."
But back to lathes. The reason I am telling you this is because today, in makey-things class, we did some lathing. Lathing and milling are both ways to remove material, and only to remove material - adding is actually really really hard. Instead, you deliberately cast slightly larger than the end part, and then lathe or mill it down to get your exact size. And yes, this does mean the primary purpose of a lathe is to remove metal from a casting. It has very, very sharp tools and a very powerful motor and must be respected, but, dude!
Another lathe anecdote: at one of the fine old tech schools, there used to be a series of machining classes you'd take, which were like grown-up makey-things class. You would start at the beginning with one lathe and some metal bars, and through various castings and lathings and millings, you'd finish at the end with two lathes. The second lathe was the one you built during the course of these classes, starting with the casting of parts and going from there.
Our lathing project is not quite so awesome. Instead, this and next week we are using the lathe and the mill and we are turning our rough cast-aluminum parts into pencil holders. Kind of useless furniture, but cool too, since we made them! :D I <3 makey-things class.
