Thread: Leveling a hercus 260 Prt II

Originally Posted by RayG

Interesting, that's opposite to what I thought... sometimes you can have a twist, that's impossible to get out with having it bolted down...

Of course I might be completely wrong, but I'm pretty sure I remember Marco saying that at the scraping course when we did a session on lathe alignment. Happy to be corrected.

Regards
Ray

I had my lathe bolted down for years with no problem at all. I moved it out into the centre of the shed and didn't want to drill holes there, but it's been moved again and where it is now I am thinking of bolting it down again. Whats this about not bolting it down, once it's bolted down it wont move around.

Dave

Originally Posted by RayG

Interesting, that's opposite to what I thought... sometimes you can have a twist, that's impossible to get out with having it bolted down...

Of course I might be completely wrong, but I'm pretty sure I remember Marco saying that at the scraping course when we did a session on lathe alignment. Happy to be corrected.

Regards
Ray

It's just common sense I think, if the stand is more rigid than the lathe and you pull the bolts tight the lathe will conform to the stand. If the lathe is more rigid than the stand then the stand will conform to the lathe. If you bolt a stand to a concrete floor then they both conform to that. You just have to keep one or the other level, that's the whole purpose of using shims.

The only way you could twist it is by attaching it to a surface thats twisted or has highs and lows. The original post seemed to be at the other end of the spectrum, his stand decided to conform to the lathe bed.

That's just my thinking anyway. Im also happy to be corrected

Hi slhouetteV8,

Not quite what I was referring to, let's say you are levelling a lathe, and the twist in the bed wants to lift one corner, the only way to get that twist out is to bolt the lathe down, so you have adjustment nuts top and bottom of the support feet. That way you can pull a corner down to remove the twist.

Regards
Ray

We had a member here with that trouble, but he didn't want to bolt it down, so we recommended sand bags or something else heavy to weigh it down, but the best way is to bolt it down like Ray said.

Dave

Originally Posted by RayG

Hi slhouetteV8,

Not quite what I was referring to, let's say you are levelling a lathe, and the twist in the bed wants to lift one corner, the only way to get that twist out is to bolt the lathe down, so you have adjustment nuts top and bottom of the support feet. That way you can pull a corner down to remove the twist.

Regards
Ray

Hi Ray, I think we're talking about the same thing just thinking about it differently, you pull a twist the same way put one in. It's just the lesser conforming to the greater and from the lathes I've seen that's usually the stand. The concrete floor is always the greater.

I have straightened a lathe bed by adding a tension strut to the angle iron stand, from lower left rear to upper right front. It was just 1/2" rod with a turnbuckle to apply controlled tension. It worked very well. (Turned out the bed wasn't twisted at all but that's another story.)

Hi,

To clarify, all I did was put 40 kg of weight at each end and remove the old shims from the corners. I didn't need to adjust the lathe level bolts. It seems to be cutting well, less than 0.01mm difference over >100mm. I do have a slight wobble still but afraid I can't do anything about that at the moment. Surface finish is hard to judge accurately as I'm using MS blackbar offcuts.

Ben

ps if I could, I would bolt it to the floor. The navy bolted them to ship floors. And the army bolted them to truck floors and still do in the portable 20 ft workshop containers.

I built my a bench for my lathe, similar to the one in another thread. The frame was about 80kg, plus drawers and parts.

I used adjustable feet to get my bench stable and level before working on the lathe. I used these...

Ball Jointed Adjustable Feet - Bolt Down Adjustable Feet - Fixed Adjustable Feet