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Do lathes actually wear out? Machine tools are built like tanks and could probably last until the end of time, you just need to replace the bearings and motors

Do lathes actually wear out? Machine tools are built like tanks and could probably last until the end of time, you just need to replace the bearings and motors occasionally.

dale_glass 3y ago
Yes, it's a machine with many moving parts. There's bearings, gears, ball screws, lead screw, belts, etc. There's also multiple precision ground surfaces that wear unevenly because some parts of the surface get far more use than others. The bed tends to accumulate damage over time, as try as you might, you'll eventually drop something heavy on it. A lot of it is very much fixable, but I suppose that eventually one decides it's too much to bother, especially if something is damaged is badly enough, or the lathe is old enough and it doesn't make much business sense to fix it. If you abuse a machine badly enough you can get something bent to the point it's not really worth fixing.
Kon-Peki 3y ago
There's an entire refurbishment industry keeping them going. I know that this article said that you could order machine tools from Japan in the 1980s and get them in a few weeks. But that's not the case anymore. People buy some press or lathe or whatever out of a liquidation warehouse in Michigan for ~$50k and then pay a refurbisher $1,000,000 to get it to whatever specs they need. That's more expensive than buying a brand-new machine from Germany/Italy/Japan, but you get it installed in your facility so much faster that the extra cash is worth it. And because they last forever with proper care and maintenance, nobody cares if the "new" tool is 70 years old. Note that this behavior can easily distort the stats on demand for new machine tools ;)
- p_l 3y ago
  My understanding is that a lot of lower end in manufacturing might at time seriously consider turning old manual equipment into CNCs, not just hackers. And dunno about USA, but there's a cottage industry of people running hacked up ex-volkswagen robots despite them requiring a human holding dead man switches. They are not going to buy a new industrial robot, but they can afford to turn bunch of ex-volkswagen gear into semi-automatic machines.
  - Kon-Peki 3y ago
    I don't have much knowledge about robot conversion, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. When you've got a country that has been industrialized for a really long time, old equipment is going to be available and may be a viable option for what you want to do. Since this stuff costs a lot of money new, it can be worth fixing/modifying old stuff. If a new television cost $10000 and was delivered a few months after you ordered it, you would be shocked if television repair shops weren't in every city, and people paid $2500 for used televisions that they could get next week.
    - p_l 3y ago
      At Warsaw Hackerspace we have a Bridgeport series I MDI machine that was retrofitted locally with LinuxCNC. Various vendors sold Bridgeport clones or retrofitted originals with CNC machinery. We also have an Ex-Volkswagen KUKA robot - Volkswagen units are specific to Volkswagen and don't really work properly without "the gorilla and rest of the jungle" - in this case a Volkswagen factory line. But it can be driven in "human present" mode if you accept Volkswagen software limitations, and apparently quite a lot of places do just that.
extrapickles 3y ago
The lathe ways (the guides/support for each axis) do wear out, but you can re-grind them to be flat again. Usually you sell the machine at this point to someone who doesn’t need the precision and get a new machine.
tejtm 3y ago
If they did not; we would not have the entire art of scraping [0] Yes, if meticulously maintained and lightly used some can last a good while. In a less pristine environment, say where deadlines need to get met, they wear out unevenly, for lathes, the ways near the headstock usually see more work than the tailstock end. So, the machine now cuts a taper when it is suppose to cut parallel. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=scraping+machine+tools&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=scraping+machine+tools&ia=web

Do lathes actually wear out? Machine tools are built like tanks and could probably last until the end of time, you just need to replace the bearings and motors occasionally.

dale_glass 3y ago

Yes, it's a machine with many moving parts. There's bearings, gears, ball screws, lead screw, belts, etc. There's also multiple precision ground surfaces that wear unevenly because some parts of the surface get far more use than others. The bed tends to accumulate damage over time, as try as you might, you'll eventually drop something heavy on it. A lot of it is very much fixable, but I suppose that eventually one decides it's too much to bother, especially if something is damaged is badly enough, or the lathe is old enough and it doesn't make much business sense to fix it. If you abuse a machine badly enough you can get something bent to the point it's not really worth fixing.

Kon-Peki 3y ago

There's an entire refurbishment industry keeping them going. I know that this article said that you could order machine tools from Japan in the 1980s and get them in a few weeks. But that's not the case anymore. People buy some press or lathe or whatever out of a liquidation warehouse in Michigan for ~$50k and then pay a refurbisher $1,000,000 to get it to whatever specs they need. That's more expensive than buying a brand-new machine from Germany/Italy/Japan, but you get it installed in your facility so much faster that the extra cash is worth it. And because they last forever with proper care and maintenance, nobody cares if the "new" tool is 70 years old. Note that this behavior can easily distort the stats on demand for new machine tools ;)

p_l 3y ago
My understanding is that a lot of lower end in manufacturing might at time seriously consider turning old manual equipment into CNCs, not just hackers. And dunno about USA, but there's a cottage industry of people running hacked up ex-volkswagen robots despite them requiring a human holding dead man switches. They are not going to buy a new industrial robot, but they can afford to turn bunch of ex-volkswagen gear into semi-automatic machines.
- Kon-Peki 3y ago
  I don't have much knowledge about robot conversion, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. When you've got a country that has been industrialized for a really long time, old equipment is going to be available and may be a viable option for what you want to do. Since this stuff costs a lot of money new, it can be worth fixing/modifying old stuff. If a new television cost $10000 and was delivered a few months after you ordered it, you would be shocked if television repair shops weren't in every city, and people paid $2500 for used televisions that they could get next week.
  - p_l 3y ago
    At Warsaw Hackerspace we have a Bridgeport series I MDI machine that was retrofitted locally with LinuxCNC. Various vendors sold Bridgeport clones or retrofitted originals with CNC machinery. We also have an Ex-Volkswagen KUKA robot - Volkswagen units are specific to Volkswagen and don't really work properly without "the gorilla and rest of the jungle" - in this case a Volkswagen factory line. But it can be driven in "human present" mode if you accept Volkswagen software limitations, and apparently quite a lot of places do just that.

extrapickles 3y ago

The lathe ways (the guides/support for each axis) do wear out, but you can re-grind them to be flat again. Usually you sell the machine at this point to someone who doesn’t need the precision and get a new machine.

tejtm 3y ago

If they did not; we would not have the entire art of scraping [0] Yes, if meticulously maintained and lightly used some can last a good while. In a less pristine environment, say where deadlines need to get met, they wear out unevenly, for lathes, the ways near the headstock usually see more work than the tailstock end. So, the machine now cuts a taper when it is suppose to cut parallel. [0] https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=scraping+machine+tools&ia=web https://duckduckgo.com/?t=lm&q=scraping+machine+tools&ia=web