lathe

172 Articles

Flashlight Repair Brings Entire Workshop To Bear

September 15, 2025 by 2 Comments

The modern hacker and maker has an incredible array of tools at their disposal — even a modestly appointed workbench these days would have seemed like science-fiction a couple decades ago. Desktop 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC mills, lathes, the list goes on and on. But what good is all that fancy gear if you don’t put it to work once and awhile?

If we had to guess, we’d say dust never gets a chance to accumulate on any of the tools in [Ed Nisley]’s workshop. According to his blog, the prolific hacker is either building or repairing something on a nearly daily basis. All of his posts are worth reading, but the multifaceted rebuilding of a Anker LC-40 flashlight from a couple months back recently caught our eye.

Continue reading “Flashlight Repair Brings Entire Workshop To Bear” →

A lathe is shown on a tabletop. Instead of a normal lathe workspace, there is an XY positioning platform in front of the chuck, with two toolposts mounted on the platform. Stepper motors are mounted on the platform to drive it. The lathe has no tailpiece.

Turning A Milling Machine Into A Lathe

September 13, 2025 by 5 Comments

If you’re planning to make a metalworking lathe out of a CNC milling machine, you probably don’t expect getting a position sensor to work to be your biggest challenge. Nevertheless, this was [Anthony Zhang]’s experience. Admittedly, the milling machine’s manufacturer sells a conversion kit, which greatly simplifies the more obviously difficult steps, but getting it to cut threads automatically took a few hacks.

The conversion started with a secondhand Taig MicroMill 2019DSL CNC mill, which was well-priced enough to be purchased specifically for conversion into a lathe. Taig’s conversion kit includes the spindle, tool posts, mounting hardware, and other necessary parts, and the modifications were simple enough to take only a few hours of disassembly and reassembly. The final lathe reuses the motors and control electronics from the CNC, and the milling motor drives the spindle through a set of pulleys. The Y-axis assembly isn’t used, but the X- and Z-axes hold the tool post in front of the spindle.

The biggest difficulty was in getting the spindle indexing sensor working, which was essential for cutting accurate threads. [Anthony] started with Taig’s sensor, but there was no guarantee that it would work with the mill’s motor controller, since it was designed for a lathe controller. Rather than plug it in and hope it worked, he ended up disassembling both the sensor and the controller to reverse-engineer the wiring.

He found that it was an inductive sensor which detected a steel insert in the spindle’s pulley, and that a slight modification to the controller would let the two work together. In the end, however, he decided against using it, since it would have taken up the controller’s entire I/O port. Instead, [Anthony] wired his own I/O connector, which interfaces with a commercial inductive sensor and the end-limit switches. A side benefit was that the new indexing sensor’s mounting didn’t block moving the pulley’s drive belt, as the original had.

The end result was a small, versatile CNC lathe with enough accuracy to cut useful threads with some care. If you aren’t lucky enough to get a Taig to convert, there are quite a few people who’ve built their own CNC lathes, ranging from relatively simple to the extremely advanced.

Hacking When It Counts: DIY Prosthetics And The Prison Camp Lathe

July 14, 2025 by 13 Comments

There are a lot of benefits to writing for Hackaday, but hands down one of the best is getting paid to fall down fascinating rabbit holes. These often — but not always — delightful journeys generally start with chance comments by readers, conversations with fellow writers, or just the random largesse of The Algorithm. Once steered in the right direction, a few mouse clicks are all it takes for the properly prepared mind to lose a few hours chasing down an interesting tale.

I’d like to say that’s exactly how this article came to be, but to be honest, I have no idea where I first heard about the prison camp lathe. I only know that I had a link to a PDF of an article written in 1949, and that was enough to get me going. It was probably a thread I shouldn’t have tugged on, but I’m glad I did because it unraveled into a story not only of mechanical engineering chops winning the day under difficult circumstances, but also of how ingenuity and determination can come together to make the unbearable a little less trying, and how social engineering is an important a skill if you want to survive the unsurvivable.

Continue reading “Hacking When It Counts: DIY Prosthetics And The Prison Camp Lathe” →

Clickspring’s Experimental Archaeology: Concentric Thin-Walled Tubing

April 25, 2025 by 32 Comments

It’s human nature to look at the technological achievements of the ancients — you know, anything before the 1990s — and marvel at how they were able to achieve precision results in such benighted times. How could anyone create a complicated mechanism without the aid of CNC machining and computer-aided design tools? Clearly, it was aliens.

Or, as [Chris] from Click Spring demonstrates by creating precision nesting thin-wall tubing, it was human beings running the same wetware as what’s running between our ears but with a lot more patience and ingenuity. It’s part of his series of experiments into how the craftsmen of antiquity made complicated devices like the Antikythera mechanism with simple tools. He starts by cleaning up roughly wrought brass rods on his hand-powered lathe, followed by drilling and reaming to create three tubes with incremental precision bores. He then creates matching pistons for each tube, with an almost gas-tight enough fit right off the lathe.

Getting the piston fit to true gas-tight precision came next, by lapping with a jeweler’s rouge made from iron swarf recovered from the bench. Allowed to rust and ground to a paste using a mortar and pestle, the red iron oxide mixed with olive oil made a dandy fine abrasive, perfect for polishing the metal to a high gloss finish. Making the set of tubes concentric required truing up the bores on the lathe, starting with the inner-most tube and adding the next-largest tube once the outer diameter was lapped to spec.

Easy? Not by a long shot! It looks like a tedious job that we suspect was given to the apprentice while the master worked on more interesting chores. But clearly, it was possible to achieve precision challenging today’s most exacting needs with nothing but the simplest tools and plenty of skill. Continue reading “Clickspring’s Experimental Archaeology: Concentric Thin-Walled Tubing” →

A man in black glasses and a black t-shirt has his arms resting on a grey workbench. Between his opened hands are the two halves of a copper ice press. They are fist-sized copper cylinders. The lower half has large spiraling grooves to aid in the release of excess water from the ice being formed as it melts.

Make Ice Spheres In A Copper Press

March 2, 2025 by 11 Comments

Perfectly clear ice spheres are nifty but can be a bit tricky to make without an apparatus. [Seth Robinson] crafted a copper ice press to make his own.

Copper is well-known for its thermal conductivity, making it a perfect material for building a press to melt ice into a given shape. Like many projects, a combination of techniques yields the best result, and in this case we get to see 3d printing, sand casting, lost PLA casting, lathe turning, milling, and even some good old-fashioned sanding.

The most tedious part of the process appears to be dip coating of ceramic for the lost PLA mold, but the finished result is certainly worth it. That’s not to say that any of the process looks easy if you are a metal working novice. Taking over a week to slowly build up the layers feels a bit excruciating, especially compared to 3D printing the original plastic piece. If you’re ever feeling discouraged watching someone else’s awesome projects, you might want to stick around to the end when [Robinson] shows us his first ever casting. We’d say his skill has improved immensely over time.

If you’re looking for something else to do with casting copper alloys, be sure to checkout this bronze river table or [Robinson’s] copper levitation sphere.

Thanks to [DjBiohazard] for the tip!

Continue reading “Make Ice Spheres In A Copper Press” →

Lathe And Laser Team Up To Make Cutting Gear Teeth Easier

February 14, 2025 by 25 Comments

Fair warning: watching this hybrid manufacturing method for gear teeth may result in an uncontrollable urge to buy a fiber laser cutter. Hackaday isn’t responsible for any financial difficulties that may result.

With that out of the way, this is an interesting look into how traditional machining and desktop manufacturing methods can combine to make parts easier than either method alone. The part that [Paul] is trying to make is called a Hirth coupling, a term that you might not be familiar with (we weren’t) but you’ve likely seen and used. They’re essentially flat surfaces with gear teeth cut into them allowing the two halves of the coupling to nest together and lock firmly in a variety of relative radial positions. They’re commonly used on camera gear like tripods for adjustable control handles and tilt heads, in which case they’re called rosettes.

To make his rosettes, [Paul] started with a block of aluminum on the lathe, where the basic cylindrical shape of the coupling was created. At this point, forming the teeth in the face of each coupling half with traditional machining methods would have been tricky, either using a dividing head on a milling machine or letting a CNC mill have at it. Instead, he fixtured each half of the coupling to the bed of his 100 W fiber laser cutter to cut the teeth. The resulting teeth would probably not be suitable for power transmission; the surface finish was a bit rough, and the tooth gullet was a little too rounded. But for a rosette, this was perfectly acceptable, and probably a lot faster to produce than the alternative.

In case you’re curious as to what [Paul] needs these joints for, it’s a tablet stand for his exercise machine. Sound familiar? That’s because we recently covered his attempts to beef up 3D prints with a metal endoskeleton for the same project.

Continue reading “Lathe And Laser Team Up To Make Cutting Gear Teeth Easier” →

Modulathe Is CNC Ready And Will Machine What You Want

January 20, 2025 by 14 Comments

Once upon a time, lathes were big heavy machines driven by massive AC motors, hewn out of cast iron and sheer will. Today, we have machine tools of all shapes and sizes, many of which are compact and tidy DIY creations. [Maxim Kachurovskiy]’s Modulathe fits the latter description nicely.

The concept behind the project was simple—this was to be a modular, digital lathe that was open-source and readily buildable on a DIY level, without sacrificing usability. To that end, Modulathe is kitted out to process metal, wooden, and plastic parts, so you can fabricate in whatever material is most appropriate for your needs.

It features a 125 mm chuck and an MT5 spindle, and relies on 15 mm linear rails, 12 mm ball screws, and NEMA23 stepper motors. Because its modular, much of the rest of the design is up to you. You can set it up with pretty much any practical bed length—just choose the right ball screw and rail to achieve it. It’s also set up to work however you like—you can manually operate it, or use it for CNC machining tasks instead.

If you want a small lathe that’s customizable and CNC-ready, this might be the project you’re looking for. We’ve featured some other similar projects in this space, too. Do your research, and explore! If you come up with new grand machine tools of your own design, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Thanks to [mip] for the tip!