Mini lathe - my first attempt turning plastic - useless!

[HiltonSteve]

Hi Hank, sorry to here about the pneumonia and hope you get back up to full speed soon.

So you can't even cut plastic on your lathe! That sounds as if you are doing something seriously wrong.....

Can you give us some more info on what cutting tools you are using, speeds etc and I will see if I can help, photo's would be good.

The drill chuck may not be helping you either but for turning plastic I thought that it would be good enough. You did have it rotating the correct way didn't you???

Just had a quick look on youtube and found the video below, just to show you that it should be possible to machine steel on your machine (not sure how accurate though looking at the video!)

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejST2UNngQU"]YouTube - C2 lathe machining Steel[/ame]

[John S]

I have one of the little tiny C0 lathes, more of a toy really but handy for doing odd very small bits like screws and rivets.

As an example I made a new steel backplate for a 4 jaw chuck on it, 62mm in diameter by 15mm thick, other than the tapped hole everything else was done on this tiny lathe just to prove it could do it.
took quite a while and would have been minutes job on one of the bigger machines but it proved it can be done.

The C0 is about 1/3rd the size of what you have.