Three inch lathe

[threesixesinarow]

I finally got my little homemade lathe out of storage and set up, and took some more up to date pictures.

It's a heavy D-bed watchmaker-type lathe. I copied many of its main parts from Schaublin, but scaled them down to Unimat size.

Like the old Unimats, it can be reconfigured for different tasks, but unlike with those the tool rests and tailstocks are also easily removable, and the entire lathe can be removed from the base it shares with my small mill for more temporary setups.

It's not a great general purpose lathe. A regular American style watchmaker lathe would be much more rigid and a slightly bigger, more usable size, and those have many more accessories.

It's surprisingly capable, though! It has 3-3/8" swing and about 6" between centers, with maybe 1" clearance over the cross slide. The toolpost takes 1/8" tools.












I've made a lot of accessories for it. Some of them are already here:

Unimat size quills

Steady rest

Rocker cutoff and forming slide

Tailstock turret

Threading slide