Mini-Lathe Unpacking
When you first unpack the Mini-Lathe, it is covered in a red protective grease which needs to be cleaned off. There are many suggestions as to the best way to do this, including paraffin, WD40 and so on. I used "Gunk" which is a commonly available engine degreaser. This did the job very nicely.
I stripped the lathe down as much as I dared, and cleaned off the protective grease. Parts were regreased or lubricated as needed on re-assembly.
I used:
Finish Line Premium Grease with Teflon (for leadscrews and gears)
Comma White Grease (Spray)
Mobil1 SuperSyn (for general oiling of the ways)
This is what you get in the package:
Splash guard:
At the rear of the lathe there is a steel plate that acts as a splash / swarf guard. This has a couple of drawbacks. The main one is that it restricts the movement of the cross-slide. The second is that it make adjusting the carriage awkward. The guard lasted about 10 minuets before it was remove. It's never moved from behind the workbench where I shoved it.
Chuck Guard:
A simple plastic guard can be flipped over to cover the chuck. Total nuisance. That also lasted 10 minutes before it got improved. It's now somewhere in one of the workshop drawers.
Mini-Lathe has a two speed gearbox:
This is fitted inside the headstock. To grease the gears you need to remove the headstock from the bed. This then needs to be re-aligned on assembly. However there is a much easier way to add a little grease to the gears. First remove the controller box, You will then find a couple of earthing cables clamped under a couple of screws. If you remove one of these earth screws, you will find that the threaded hole allows access to the inside of the headstock.
The tube of a spray grease product can be inserted through this and the gears greased with a quick squirt. (Don't over do things!)
The Carriage and apron:
This is where the first mod to the lathe is done. You can see that the gears that connect the hand wheel to the pinion are totally exposed, and tend to get clogged up with metal chips. A common mod is to cut a thin plastic cover, and screw it to the apron covering the gears. It is normally secured with screws drilled and tapped into the apron casting. However the casting is a bit thin, and with a new machine I did not like the idea of drilling holes in it. I came up with a simple solution. I cut a cover out of some fairly soft plastic. and after cleaning the casting I used some hook and loop tape on the edges of the casting. It took a little time to cut to shape, but it secures the cover very nicely, and without drilling holes. The gears were greased before the cover was put on.
The electronic speed controller:
One problem is that the Mini-Lathe blows fuses if it jams. This is exactly what is supposed to happen, as it protects the gears, but can become tedious if it happens too often. There is the temptation to shove in a bigger fuse as well!. A simple solution is to install an auto reset breaker unit. If this blows, it will reset after a few seconds. As the photo shows I simply soldered it to one of the tags on the existing fuse holder, and connected the wire that was previously connected to that tag to the other side of the thermal fuse/breaker. I machined up a brass dummy fuse to replace the 3A fuse in the holder. The breaker was Maplin Electronics Stock Number AK10L Unfortunately Maplin electronics have now ceased trading.
The breaker is a common type and there are many similar devices available. for example The Trupower FC67200 An301 3A circuit breaker. Rapid Online stock number 26-1160
