mini lathe mods

**marksbug** · Jul 8, 2020, 05:00 PM

darn your one lucky feller!!! free 12x 37 or 12x anything lathe is a great price to pay!!! I would love a gap bed lathe, somuch more than can be done with them...sometimes. I dont use either of my lathes much at all or either of my milling machines, but it sure is nice to have them when you need them. the lathes come is oh sohandy for many things even resizing pvc pipe fittings and other plastic stuff for all kinds of things. I have a lot of tools&tooling and machines that get little usage.but I can do almost any thing when I need to. I hate going to my brothers to do any thing at all, he has more toys than I do and more **** too.....usually in the way and his shop isn't airconditioned or heated and isn't 6 steps out my bedroom back door either. I hope to get back to using a lot of it toward the end of the year when this current building project is done. I have lots of new tooling Ive never used....
your 7x14 is probably the same as mine. ive done a lot with it.

**Stevohdee** · Jul 10, 2020, 07:54 PM

Hey Mark, yep some lathes have what u want but fail in other areas. It's a bit of a gamble buying the cheapest but apparently some of the bigger, more expensive models have teething probs as well. Keep Yr small one, cheers

**Stevohdee** · Jul 10, 2020, 08:01 PM

Hey Paul, great score on the free 12 x 37,sounds nice, what brand/make is it?

**Paul Jones** · Jul 11, 2020, 04:47 PM

The 12" x 37" gear head and gap bed (can swing almost 18" in the 6" gap) was made in 1987 in Taiwan by the Dar Sin Machinery Works (DARSIN). It uses very high tolerance Japanese taper roller bearings good (to less than 0.0001" TIR verified with an Interapid 0.0001" test indicator). The spindle is more accurate the longer the lathe runs. The lathe weighs approximately 1,200 pounds and is well built with lots of cross ribbing in the way bed. It uses D1-4 mountings for the chucks. It came with a 3-jaw chuck and faceplate in pretty good shape. Later for the not free part I bought an 8" 4-jaw chuck and finally a 6" 6-jaw set-tru chuck (can be easily set to less than 0.0005" TIR). The 6-jaw chuck is used the most and also can hold another CNC ER32 collet chuck for diameters less than 0.5" (the 6-jaw can't collapse down to these small diameters). The part I like the best is the cross slide and compound ways/gibs are hand scrapped but do have a little wear.

These are the TPI and Metric threads the lathe can cut using the quick change gear selections (except for those with a 30T gear that still requires modifications like I presented in this posting).