Epoxy granite metal lathe - videos

[Robert Steinwandel]

Hi Frank and everyone. (Hope this works first post here ever) I may be able to answer some questions about the lathe, although I’d love to hear more as it sounds like you all have quite a bit more experience than I do here.

For the epoxy granite, it’s admittedly been a few months since I’ve thought too much about it but I spent weeks reading the entire cnc zone main epoxy granite thread for the bulk of my research, and based on that I believe 11% by weight is close enough to optimal that chasing lower epoxy percents would have diminishing returns. ckelloug took stiffness measurements on many samples of eg and although around 7-8% by weight was better, 10-11% was very similar stiffness.

The look of the side of my casting looks like a total disaster lol, I absolutely see why you think it had terrible settling problems. I actually switched aggregate sources for one of my sizes of granite, the original source was black the new one white. So it looks like there was bad settling, but that was just me gradually switching to the white aggregate as I ran out of black (graded to the same size range of course).

As for thermal issues, honestly Im very concerned about that as I do not have a conditioned shop to work in, so my temps range from around 10F to 100F through the year. I think I can minimize warp with strips of steel attached to the bottom of the casting so when there’s a temp change it at least has even pressure on the top and bottom and doesn’t tend to “banana” so badly

I’ll stop typing now in case this doesn’t post or something lol, but hopefully that at least clears a few things up I forgot to mention on YouTube!