Quote Originally Posted by Toolmaker51 View Post
$400.00 There are a lot of old machines selling for way more, kind of a geographic thing. The shock is what they sold for new, how many times they earned it back; over, over and over, while men running them are long gone.
My brother just moved to Pennsylvania and had to sell his 40yrs of hoarding old machines. He sold his huge Hitachi mill that is a direct copy of a Cincinnati for $1000. Because it was so huge it took someone with a crane and the truck to haul a 4ton machine. The guy couldn't believe he was selling it so cheap but in two years of advertising nobody even called until this pump company. They had been looking for several years for something like it. Like you said, he'd had it for 30yrs and it didn't owe him anything. Bridgeport's abound but my brother just scoffed at them.

It begs the question, has CNC killed the machinists of old? Isn't there more to it than just inputting a program and setting up? Now with 3D printing there's the idea you won't need to machine anything and all of this will go away. But like black smithing it could become a lost art then have a comeback?

Meanwhile my journey with my hobby lathe continues. Thanks to you TM51 and Olderdan for the tips on the 3MT collet and reamer blank I was able to get the head on the 9x20 from .0035 out of tram to an astounding .0002! My next hurdle is the tail stock is .006 taller than the head now. So do I scrape the ways on the bottom of the tailstock( one side is v and the other flat) or just take the mating surface of say the bottom half of tailstock down? I guess the mating surface would be easier as its flatter. I've never tried to scrape v ways. But both the v and the flat are NOT very pretty right now. Looks like they did the rough cut and left it at that