Pimping the mini-lathe

no i don't have anything on that one on here just the other money pit am trying to finish it started as a plasma table but ended up as a gantry mill. the 9 x 21 was actually a combo machine with the mini mill attachment and the milling head is on the gantry machine at the moment.

i did try to put the big machine back together after i did some E.G. casting but i have to do some clean up for the ball screw clearance on the long axis. the material sagged a little bit and i had very little clearance to begin with so i have to take that back apart and knock the high spots off with a concrete grinding wheel to fix things.

to much other stuff going on in the summer time to have a lot of time for working on machines it seems.

I know what you mean. It is much nicer to go paddling with my kayak than to do wiring.

I also dabbled in E/G. I would kind of like to make a little surface grinder the size of a LIP 515 out of E/G.

when i did my casting i ended up with about 2100 lbs of E.G. which took about 27 gallons of epoxy. cost a lot more than i thought it would did exactly what i wanted but did not expect it to take as much E.G. that it did makes for a nice machine base but can get costly pretty fast.

i wish i was able to relax on the river doing some boating but my life seems to be all work and no play. to busy playing grounds keeper, mechanic and general handy man lately

I'd sure like to see some pictures of that E/G base. How did you mix, pour, degass and vibrate it?

vibration has been my go to method but on something that big it was it was impossible so tamping it down as you go was what i was able to do. mixing that much material by hand is not the best way to go about it but that was what i ended up doing. don't care to do it again

a small cement mixer would work well but the clean up would be impossible with epoxy. if you could line the mixer with a plastic bag of some sort that might work for clean up? what ever is used for mixing gets destroyed pretty much so on something big you would need something to act as a disposable liner if a mixer was used.