Arrived

The Sherline lathe arrived on Thursday. I was working that night but stayed up extra late and more or less got it assembled. It went together without a lot of drama. The digital readout box makes whether you bought the lathe with American or SI verniers irrelevant since you can select metric or "Imperial" on the digital readout box.

The readout box also includes an optical tachometer to keep track of the rpm rate of the lathe. The DC controller knob will give you stable rotational rates down to about 200-250 rpm.

This morning, I mounted the lathe on a piece of chipboard for stability.

I bought a couple of pieces of aluminum round bar, a piece of stainless round bar and 3 feet of hot rolled steel round bar to practice on.  You can see one of the aluminum round bars mounted in the lathe.

Taking a different direction

A few months ago, I had planned on acquiring another BfB Rapman with two print heads this time so that I could explore the use of PLA as a support material for ABS prints.

With the sale of BfB to 3D Systems, continuing troubles with BfB firmware and the catastrophic failure of my expensive Rapman hot end and the discovery that BfB isn't warranting such failures, I've decided to build my own second printer.

To that end, I've just purchased a Sherline 4410 metric lathe.

It will be arriving Thursday.