A final consideration is the material that the drills are made from. After cutting, I smoothed the end of the arbor on my disc sander. You should wear a dust mask preferably a good, industrial-quality one when cutting MDF since the dust contains formaldehyde which can irritate your throat and lungs. These are very useful wood turning chuck jaws 01 have on hand when you need them. All of the leaves fold up into the handle to protect wood turning chuck jaws 01 from bending or cutting you! You can purchase them from a variety of sources, but you will want a very small one with a 2 Morse Taper arbor to work effectively on the minilathe. Milling Adapter from LMS.

Environmental design writer Katie Treggiden will head up the judging panel for the new Dezeen Awards sustainability categories. X-ray images of flowers by researcher and designer Mathew Schwartz form the identity of this year's Dezeen Awards.

This year's Dezeen Awards features media categories for the first time, with awards for architecture photography, video and visualisations plus websites for studios and brands. Introducing new Dezeen Awards prizes for sustainable architecture, interiors and design!

Our three categories celebrating projects that make positive environmental and social contributions are now open for entries. Dezeen Awards is now accepting entries! End of update. I find a dial caliper to be indispensable in my shop - it is one of the tools I use most frequently. In fact , I keep 2 or 3 around so that if one gets misplaced or broken work does not come to a stop. With it you can measure diameters, depths of holes, inside diameters of holes to an accuracy of.

Watch out for 1 vernier calipers - these do not have a dial, and are a pain to read since you have to interpolate the reading 2 cheap plastic calipers. In the catalogs they look like the real thing, and often cost as much, but they are junk. Make sure the catalog specifies stainless steel. Harbor Freight SKU Digital calipers are used just like dial calipers for making inside and outside measurements accurate to one one thousandth of an inch but have a direct LCD digital readout.

On a dial caliper you first read the major dimension to the nearest tenth of an inch from the slide and mentally add to that the minor dimension from the dial to the nearest thousandth. This becomes second nature after a while, but still introduces opportunities to make a mistake. A digital caliper reads out the full dimension on the display, so is pretty foolproof, as long as it is properly zeroed.

You can also switch between metric and inch modes as needed. They are now available at prices that make them very attractive for home shop use. Update: I bought one for myself and am pretty happy with it. Read the review for more info. They have, for the most part, been accurate and reliable, but I've gotten at least two in which the display continually blinks on and off.

That's supposed to indicate a low battery, but these blinked even with a fresh battery. However, HF exchanged them with no hassle for ones that work properly. Good idea to test them before you leave the store, if possible. I discovered that using silver batteries eliminates the blinking display issue.

There are batteries of identical size, but different electrical properties. The silver batteries are AG13 size, Ag being the chemical symbol for silver. Silver AG batteries. You can find 10 and packs of these batteries on eBay search for 'AG13 battery' at very favorable prices. In some cases I have ordered them from vendors in Hong Kong, and they arrived within a week or two via US mail. As a corollary, avoid batteries sold for hearing aids.

I used to use them because they were easy to find locally, but they don't have the power needed for the digitial display tools. Drill rod is a steel alloy with a shiny silvery color thus it is known in the U. For many applications, this means that the outside surface requires no additional finishing.

While not classified as a stainless steel, drill rod is moderately resistant to rust - more, at least, than ordinary carbon steels. It is great for applications such as shafts and axles. It is available from the usual industrial suppliers typically in 3-foot lengths. Don't confuse this material with Drill Blanks which are short lengths of hardened high-speed steel used for making drills.

A useful property of drill rod is that it can easily be hardened by heating to a red hot state and then quenching in oil or water. Thus treated, the metal is hard enough to use for tools such as punches. Depending on the quenching method, drill rod comes in three types: air hardening, water hardening and oil hardening. Drilling is one of the most commonly performed operations on the lathe, so you will need a good collection of decent-quality drills.

When you buy your lathe, don't forget to order a tailstock chuck and arbor to hold the drills. Poor quality drills are easy to find, but they are truly a waste of money. Check the fine print to make sure that the drills you buy are made from High Speed Steel HSS and not from softer carbon steel. It's not always easy to tell a good drill bit from a poor one just by looking and, of course, its even harder if all you have is a picture on a web site or in a catalog.

Generally, though, the lowest priced drill sets are the ones to stay away from. Unless you do a lot of metric work, these will meet most of your needs on the minilathe. Set of 29 TiN coated fractional inch drills. Set of 60 black oxide coated number drills. Set of fractional, number and letter drills.

There are several other factors that you need to be aware of when selecting drills. The drills commonly used are called "jobber" drills. These are the type that we are all familiar with that you would find in your local hardware or automotive store. Update I've noticed that the drill bits in some of the cheaper import drill sets that I've purchased as "spares" you can't have too many! When you rotate them in the chuck, you can actually see the tip trace out a small circle.

Not good! I don't know how to detect this condition before making the purchase, but when you buy a new set of drills, you might want to check for this condition before you use them and return them to the seller if they are out-of-round.

End of Update. Another type that can be handy for the minilathe, especially the 7x10, are Screw Machine Drills. These look much like jobber drills but are shorter - which can be a real advantage within the short confines of the 7x I bought a set when I had my 7x10 and on several occasions they enabled me to drill a hole when a jobber drill was too long. Another factor to consider is the coating of the drill bits.

Typically you will find three coating options: Uncoated bright steel Black Oxide TiN Titanium Nitride Update Over the last few years, a number of new exotic coatings have become available. I have not tested these newer coatings, so I can't report on any advantages, but it's pretty safe to assume that a coated drill will outperform an uncoated one by resisting chip welding and thus staying cooler and cutting a cleaner hole.

Coated drill bits, and especially the newer TiN coated ones, shed chips more easily and are thus less likely to bind or get chips welded to the drill bit surface.

Aluminum is especially subject to chip welding, and if it occurs, the welded chips can scour the hole surface and generally mess things up.

Additionally, while extremely thin, the TiN coating is very hard and is said to increase drill bit life. I have had good service from TiN coated drills and can definitely recommend them. Usually, these are better quality drills and selecting them makes it much less likely that you will end up with really poor quality drills. A final consideration is the material that the drills are made from. Stay away from ordinary carbon steel drill bits - these are often sold in hardware stores and are suitable only for wood and soft materials.

The only practical choices for minilathe work are high speed steel HSS and Cobalt steel. The cobalt ones are harder and will last longer, but are also more expensive. HSS is a good choice if, like most of us, you are on a budget. One tip to extending the life of any drill set: when drilling a hole, such as a pilot hole, for which the exact drill diameter is not critical, choose an off-size bit.

This covers just the real basics of drill selection. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of specialized drill types used in industry, but for our needs the basic jobber drills in HSS are generally adequate.

A faceplate is a handy accessory for turning odd-shaped work that cannot easily be held in a chuck. While the Grizzly 7x12 includes this accessory out of the box, one has not been available for the 7x10 until about December Harbor Freight now offers a cast iron faceplate for the 7x10 as SKU for While it's not too difficult to make your own faceplate from steel or aluminum, at this price it's hardly worth the effort.

It will fit any of the Sieg-made 7x mini lathes. The faceplate mounts to the 7x10 spindle in the same way as the chuck, but the 6x1mm studs required are not provided. You can make your own by parting the heads off of some bolts , if you do not have a source for the studs. After mounting the faceplate on the spindle, it is standard practice for faceplates to take a light one-time facing cut to ensure that the face of the plate is square with the lathe.

Cast iron dust is very harmful to breathe, so I strongly recommend wearing a dust mask during this operation and until you have vacuumed up the resulting dust. When using a faceplate, always ensure that the work is securely clamped down and balanced by some offsetting piece of metal, if necessary.

Work at low RPMs. Feeler gages are sets of thin steel strips of accurate thicknesses, typically from. There are typically about 20 to 40 separate strips in a set, joined together by a bolt that runs through a hole in the end of each gage. Each gage has the thickness marked on it, in both inches and mm in the example below. All of the leaves fold up into the handle to protect them from bending or cutting you! Feeler gage set with a few leaves removed. While their intended purpose is to measure the gap between two surfaces, such as the electrodes of spark plug, when removed from the set, they make nearly ideal shims for adjusting the height of cutting tools - but only until you get a Quick Change Tool Post , of course ;- Just remove a few leaves from the set and stack them as needed under the bottom of the cutting tool until the tip of the cutting too is right on the centerline of the lathe.

You can find them at automotive stores and probably in the auto parts section at Wal-Mart; also at Harbor Freight. A follower rest is similar to a steady rest , but is attached to and travels with the carriage to provide a moving support for the work behind the cutting tool. This is very handy when trying to turn limber work which would otherwise bow out away from the tool. If you have ever wondered about the two screw holes on the left edge of the carriage, now you know what they are for - they are the mounting holes for the follower rest.

Centers are often used in the tailstock to support the end of a relatively long and limber workpiece. The minilathe comes with a 2 MT "dead" center. The drawback of a "dead" center is that the center does not rotate, while the workpiece that it supports does, leading to friction and possibly overheating.

By contrast, the tip of a "live" center is rotates freely in bearings, and rotates with the workpiece so that the friction is greatly reduced. Live Center mounted in tailstock ram. The Harbor Freight used to and may still come with a 2 MT "live" center but the 7x12's that I have owned did not come with one. You can purchase them from a variety of sources, but you will want a very small one with a 2 Morse Taper arbor to work effectively on the minilathe.

MDF is not really an accessory, I suppose, but it is a handy, inexpensive, lightweight and easily workable material to have around the shop. It is a synthetic material something like masonite, but with different properties. It cuts easily using a saber saw, circular saw, bandsaw, table saw or radial arm saw. One disadvantage is that it tends to absorb moisture, but this propensity can be greatly reduced by spray-painting the surfaces.

It works best for applications such as bench tops since it resists compression well. It is weaker where the edges are exposed and especially when screws must be driven into the edges, since the screws tend to separate the layers that make up the material. Drilling pilot holes for the screws will help prevent this. You should wear a dust mask preferably a good, industrial-quality one when cutting MDF since the dust contains formaldehyde which can irritate your throat and lungs.

I have used it for lots of projects around the shop, including an enclosure for the mini-lathe and a base for the mini-mill. You will find it in the lumber section of your local hardware stores such as Lowes and Home Depot, in both 4x8' sheets as well as pre-cut "hobby size" 2x2' and 2x4' pieces. Around September 02, a milling attachment became available as a standard accessory for the mini lathe.

Before this accessory became available, many lathe owners made their own versions based on the one made by Varmint Al. Varmint Al's uses a standard milling vise while the one shown below uses socket head screws to hold the workpiece between the jaws.

While by no means a substitute for mini-mill, this accessory is an inexpensive way to add limited milling capability to your mini-lathe while you save up for a mill. Milling Adapter from LMS. While not exactly an accessory, I find all kinds of uses for this stuff in the shop, but where I find it most valuable is for tacking assemblies in place while prototyping the design of a component or machine modification.

The glue sets rapidly and can be accelerated by pulling the glued parts apart a few times after applying the glue. Hey, it's not my idea, that's what the manufacturer recommends and they're right, it really speeds up the setting time.

Lathe Tools 10mm Journal Storage Cabinet Locking Mechanism Inc