building your own

[naughtyboy]

my boy wants to look at building some workshop gear himself, after reading an article about the gingery books.
hes seen a set of 7 on amazon but they are quite dear.

are they any good?
or are there better ones to get.

cheers

just seen note he left by coffee machine as saved some info on building small drill using pipe fittings, looks ok but wouldnt trust it to drill anything decent.

 

[rtbcomp]

I think they can be downloaded, a good Google might turn something up.

 

[Spot the welders dog]

http://bookos.org/g/D.%20Gingery

 

[Big Pete]

I have a few of the gingery books, they are great info and a good way to get ideas, but if you actually want to work with metal, a lot of the time nowdays it would be considerably more efficient to get a job as a paperboy/pizza delivery/whatever, and buy some cheap chinese machine tools. If he actually completes any of the gear he will have learned a hell of a lot of skills, but the end results, with the possible exception of the shaper, cannot do much serious cutting. If you are time rich (because there is a lot of work involved) and have no cash they will get you into the game, but with the relative cheapness of machine tools nowdays you would be better off buying something.

Have a google for gingery lathe etc and see the scale of what you end up with. There are a lot of people who started them, but haven't finished them as well.

 

[MrFluffy]

Petes bang on, or option 2 buy him a old worn out lathe and mill and have him teach himself how to recondition it. Afterwards he'll have had the same learning experience, but the machine hopefully will outperform any chinese or gingery lathe you could name.

 

[bigegg]

+3 on the "recondition old machinery" bit.

The gingery books are good, for what they are.
The lathe is very light because it is made with aluminium.
It is also, by neccessity, limited in bed size by the volume of aluminium which can be safely melted/handled in a home foundry.

MUCH better to obtain a good sized old cast iron lathe, perhaps with parts missing, and rebuild it using the techniques in the gingery book.

be warned tho - once you start casting aluminium, it's addictive.

 

[rtbcomp]

Another good reason to buy something and recondition it is that you'll know it inside out, which will help when the time comes to fix it.

 

[Big Pete]

I would be exceptionally impressed with any lad who as the patience to hand scrape a worn bed. The trouble with a refurb job is that you need to have a pretty decent skill set (or access to someone who has, and who also has the time to teach/help) to successfully complete a machine rebuild. You often need access to stuff like lathes and mills to make the replacement parts.

 

[Hopefuldave]

+4 on reconditioning - that Gingery is good, but not a patch on a half-decent British/American/European/Soviet lathe! It's limited in size, rigidity and features, more an exercise in casting and bare-bones machining than a practical tool. Question is, does he want to make tools, or make things with tools? The construction of a Gingery lathe is quite a long-term project in itself..._

A cheap used lathe will probably come with chucks, tooling etc. which will cost more to add to a lathe he's building from scratch than buying a lathe to rebuild, and may have Modern Conveniences like power feeds, a screwcutting gearbox, etc. - Have a watch of eBay, and read up a bit on www.lathes.co.uk, lots of detail there.

I bought and repaired/modernised mine, cost me under 400 quid to buy, was an interesting project, and I have a machine that outperforms anything Chinese by a long way, with all the bells and whistles! It's a bit of a rarity, so I've had to make parts and do a lot of research along the way, all good exercise for my aging brain

Just my ha'pennorth,
Dave H. (the other one)

 

[stormin]

As someone has already said the limiting factor of the Gingery machines is the Alumnium bed castings. I feel a better way to go is buy an old lathe bed only, I bought two off ebay for less than a fiver each and build something up from them. That way you start with a nice solid cast iron bed. The rest of the machine can be built up and upgraded as you get better skills.