Mini-Lathe Tuning, Modifications, Upgrades, and Tooling

 Nearly a month into playing with my Vevor MX-S716G 8"x16" lathe I've learned a few things and stepped up both my skills and the machine's capabilities several notches. As I said, I had operated a home-built lathe 50 years ago, and I inherited a small assortment of machinist's tools from my great uncle (worked at the US Navy Yard during WWII), reducing the pain of buying tooling. The first cutter I tried was one I ground, under my father's watchful eye, when I was 14. 

 Why the Vevor 8x16? I could say I did some "research," but I just read reviews like you.  It seemed to meet my needs for a price I didn't mind (about $700). So far, so good.

This is a small lathe with limited power and rigidity. It will turn plastics and soft metals easily, but for steel take very light cuts. It will do it well and accurately, but you need to keep the tool pressure low. What reduces tool pressure?

• Sharp tools.
• Light cuts.
• Slow feed.
  
• Very small tool tip radius. You want to be cutting a very narrow chip on steel. This also means slow feed, because you are by definition cutting  spiral, and the smaller the radius the more obvious (use a sharp point and you are cutting threads!). So feed slow.
• Lubricant. Motor oil works well. There are many cutting products.
  

Set-Up. They come assembled but adjusted loose. Expect to clean everything, adjust the gibs, oil all of the ways, and grease the gears. Take your time, expecting to spend several hours on tuning.

Just the same, there were some fixes that needed tended to early on.

• Bolt it down. Sturdy bench. The more rigid the better.I added a plank if 1-inch marine ply to the benchtop and 3-inch backing plates on the underside. Overkill, but shake is bad.
  
• Work light. You can't have enough.
• Mount it with several feet of clearance to the left of the headstock end so you can have stuff hang out. The tailstock can be within 10 inches of an obstruction (you will slide the tailstock off ocationally). 
• Mount it close to the front edge of the bench. You don't want stuff there anyway.  Most people build a rack for stuff behind it, sometimes hanging off the chip guard on the right side. But wait until you see what works.
  
• Tailstock ways ground and filed. The casting was just bad. Even locked down it wobbled. The bed, cross slide, and compound  ways were all ground well, just the tailstock was bad. 20 minutes with a file set it right. It is helpful to have a tailstock chuck and put something long it, so you can make sure the tailstock is straight.
  
• Align the tailstock with the headstock. up/down, fore/back, and also angle. BTW, the tailstock can be adjusted to the side for turning shallow tapers (like Morse), but this feature is mostly used only for alignment.
  
• Tailstock keyway was missing, I suspect the result of casting finishing error. The tailstock chuck would spin when not locked down. The key is a thick washer with a flat side, installed down a drilled hole, and the hole was not properly drilled to allow the washer to sit flat. As a result, the installer just left it out.This was actually a little tricky, in part because it is hard to see and you've got no drawing to work from. It required the turning of a new washer, grinding the flat to fit, and finishing of the hole. But it turned out fine.
• Re-fit all the handles. They were sloppy feeling, and this can affect accuracy. Some required shimming of the axle diameter, some required washers. The compound handle was too small and the handle was not designed to pin, so I made a new one from scratch, turning the handle and using some 3/8-inch square bar for the cross piece.
• Cross slide lock. Yes, you need one. Otherwise, the cross slide can move away from the work while facing or using a boring bar. Many videos on-line.Most show milling a T-shaped block, but I just welded some 1/2 x 1 flat bar to some 1/4 x 1 1/2 flat bar and ground it to fit. Very smooth. A recessed Allen cap screw locks it. 
• Ways chip guard. An accordion-shaped bit of rubberized cloth that you can get on Amazon for $6. Attach to the headstock and cross slide with magnetic tape. Chips are not so damaging, but if you use a grinder or sand paper, the grit will cause wear.

Tooling. Stuff you need. I'm going to assume standard hand tools and a grinder. A lot of other things help, like a drill press, Port-a-Band, welding machine, and well, a full shop. I will just point out the vital and lathe-specific.

• Lathe tools (chisels). A set of indexable carbide-tipped tools are good if you have never ground tools before. I had and I inherited a stack. But they are still very nice and stay sharp a long time. Their Achilles heel is that they are brittle and don't like discontinuous cutting, such as rounding square stock. High speed steel is tougher and less likely to break (I've chipped some inserts, but not HSS).
• Blank tool stock. The easiest way to turn a pulley (you're a sailor?) is to grind a tool to the profile of the groove. I have one specific to 1/4-inch Amsteel, of course. I'm sure I will make more.
  
• Tailstock chuck. You can't drill without one. $25.
• Center drills. Because they are short they are just better at starting a centered hole than a regular drill. And for centers, of course.
  
• Taps and dies to about 1/2-inch, holders, and a drill set from 1/16- to 1/2-inch by 64ths. You can thread on the lath, but you won't want to. And many builds have non-concentric tapped holes, like the cross slide handle I made. Also a center punch.
• Files. All kinds. for knocking off corners and cleaning things up. And for fixing up the lathe. A big mill file is a start, but add smaller ones and  rat tail files.
  
• Soft blow hammer. Use this to set tapers in the tailstock.
  
• Center marking gauge. Some things you hold in the chuck, but many are better stabilized with a center in the tailstock.  The old school 90 degree T-type works fine.
• Measuring tools. A digital caliper is the workhorse, but you'll add more.
• Scribe. A pencil is not good enough. For better visibility, cover it with Sharpie and then scratch through that.
• Bump center. This is an alignment tool. It took me a few weeks to figure out that I needed one, and boy can it be handy. Make you own with 1/2-inch square bar and some in-line skate bearings.
• Face plates. 
• Chuck spider (for chucking short things--Google it). I welded up my own from 1/4-inch stock and ground/filed it flat. Get the simplest one you can, with legs no more than about 0.35-inch wide (to chuck 1/2-inch work). Plastic is OK, the load is not the great.
  

Milling. And then there is the milling stuff. Yup, it will do light duty milling on brass and aluminum, but I expect it to struggle with steel. It is also no substitute for a separate drill press.

• Milling 90 degree plate. You can buy this for $50. It bolts in place of the tool rest.
• Marking/bolting 90 degree plates and squares. Can be bought or made from angle iron and filed square. Lots of holes on a grid. I tapped mine so that I can just use studs and drilled bars.
  
• Assorted small clamps. Get them as you need them. Used with the 90 degree plate.
  
• Milling vice. Get the simplest one you can, with vertical travel. Simpler means more rigid. Bolts onto the cross slide. Like the lathe, mine required some rework (handle, gibs, and mounting bolts). $50
• End mills (a set). I'll probably get a slitting saw (turn the arbor?) and some woodruff-style cutters soon.  A round-end mill. I need to see what projects I have.
  

Hand Turning. Wood can be turned, of course (I have a wood lathe, but a small lathe has advantages too). Metal can also be turned, with small chisel and care.

• Tool rest. You can use a piece of 1/2-inch square stock in the tool holder, but it is limited. I welded up a nice stiff one from 1/2x1 strip and 1/4x1 1/2 strip about 6 inches long that bolts in place of the tool holder. 
• Hand tools. Some folks use graver's chisels. I made adapters that pressed into 1/2-inch ID tubing that hold 1/4x1/4 lathe bits with 2 set screws. The tips are ground differently from standard bits, typically like a V-wood turning tool, but with less rake. Then I slipped wood handles over the end of the tubing, making them close to the length of a wood turning chisel, because that is what I am used to. Mostly handy for turning rounded ends.
• Expect to use it for wood as well. Tool handles, for example. You can do it free hand or using the slides for precise work (fitting handle ferules, for example).  

Tool Storage. There are a lot of bits and pieces. I have a tray on the chip guard for keys, Allen wrenches, and scribes. Trays to my right hold lathe bits, jigs for holding pulleys and similar, face plates, and shims for lathe bits. Another tray holds all of the milling stuff. A shallow drawer to one side holds measuring and layout tools.

Scraps. You will need lots and lots of aluminum, brass, plastic, and wood scrap. Rods, tubing, and plates. Hole saws are darn handy for turning thick plates into thinnish round blanks for pulleys and the like.

If If I added  up the cost of all the tooling I'm pretty sure it is more than the lathe, but I had a lot of it and made a lot of it. I've only spent ~ $75, but that's a cheat number.

Mini-Lathe

rev. 1-12-2025, rev. 1-17-2025

I'm kind of a shop junky. I use my tools a lot, but yes, by normal standards I'm not the average credit card sailor.

I built a metal lathe in junior high school from washing machine parts, a few things I cast, and a few things from the hardware store. It vaguely resembled a Uni-mat, and it turned out some bicycle and skateboard parts. A few things for work. However, it was non-standard and wore out 30 years ago. I've been wanting to replace it, but they're expensive. I learned a lot of good drill press and hole saw hacks to get around it when making the odd bushing. But I just wanted one, and now I'm retired, basically, so why not?

 

I settled on an 8x16 lathe from Vevor. The reviews were mixed, some saying that it could do some good work after some adjustments, tuning, and slight modifications. Others said it was a boat anchor that couldn't do shit. After about four hours of adjusting, tweaking, tiny changes, and testing, I'm firmly in camp one. I think it is going to be just swell.

 

 

 Normally I hate unboxing photos. So typical of You Tube. But hauling it around to the basement entrance in the snow and then opening the plywood crate really reminded me of the "special award" scene in "A Christmas Story." I kept saying in my head "Careful! It's fragilee."

 

They ship them loosely assembled. If you can't adjust and tune a lathe, you are going to be disappointed. Since I built my last one from washing machine parts, and have some practice on real machines, tuning it up was just a few hours of plesant tinkering. The only real "fix" was re-grinding the tailstock slide, which was botched at the factory, but that took only minutes and not it is tight. I added a few spacers and washers here and there, and a few shims where they were needed. Now it seems to turn plastic, aluminum, and steel to a pretty good finish and precision, with minimal fuss. Another problem some people have, judging from the you tube videos, is that they don't use cutting fluid. Well, that's just a mistake on a lathe or mill unless you are working plastic. Technically, you don't need it, but you get a better finish and precision with it. I use a water/oil emulsion type by Anchor Lubes. A spray bottle is all you need. Flood systems are for mills and for CNC production environments (the flush helps move the chips to a collection point).

My Scan wall unit base is perhaps not the sturdiest, so I mounted it on a 1-inch marine ply sub-base and used backing plates inside. I weighs about 85 pounds, I think. Not too hard to pick up.

 

There is a wood lathe I use on the bench to the left, (hanging on the wall in storage at the moment), so I have a handy switched outlet (curiously, the wood lath does not have a switch).

 

 I got a set of carbide insert tools to go with it. They seem good, with enough shapes for most things. Several boring bars and parting tool was included, as well as right and left cut tools, several radiuses, and threading tips. They work well. I have some HSS tool stock, so I can grind a few custom tools for thimbles and pulleys. I had to make a set of shims to go under the tools, of course, to get them to the correct height. Just a standard thing that perhaps some of the buyers didn't anticipate. I remember some complaining that they should have come with and they they didn't have shim stock. Whiners. 

I've heard complaints about the slide gibbs on the Vevor machines, but they were actually pretty good. Perhaps eventually I will make a new set from brass, but that's down the road. Meanwhile, they adjust up nice and snug with no wobble. A little more friction than I like, but we'll see how the bed in.

The run out on the chuck is about 0.005. I'm not going to work over it. The spindle bearings came snug with no meaningful runout. I'll have to check the lube and adjustment after a few hundred hours.

At one point I was experimenting on a stub of thick walled aluminum tubing, and it finally just folded up. It seems I had turned the wall thickness down to 0.010 inches, which was OK, but 0.005 inches was too little. But that is pretty impressive, to me. That's thin.

I made a small mistake in not getting a compound slide. I read the description wrong. But the plus side is better rigidity, so on an inexpensive lathe, maybe it's just as well. The are other ways to make champers, and long tapers are better turned by off-setting the tailstock.

Which reminds me. I did have to alight the tailstock alignment. There is a mechanism, but it is clunky, and I will probably pull it apart and clean it up when I need it.

I got a set of carbide insert tools to go with it. They seem good, with enough shapes for most things. Boring bars too, which seem to work well. I have some HSS tool stock, so I can grind a few custom tools for thimbles and pulleys. I had to make a set of shims to go under the tools, to get them at the correct height. Just a standard thing that perhaps some of the buyers didn't anticipate. I remember some complaining that they should have come with and they they didn't have shim stock. Whiners.

I did some test drilling from the tailstock. No problems. I did purchase a chuck for that (Morse #2 taper).

 

I turned aluminum, steel, and plastic. All good. The surface finish kept improving as I learned what each material liked with these tools. No chattering and nice long chips, often many feet long, even with steel.

The motor and speed controls seem good. Enough power, and I didn't notice bothersome bogging down with any depth of cut that made sense. The power feed works fine. I did not play with threading yet. I'm sure I'll mostly used taps and dies. But it does come with change gears.

I've got a few small boat projects in mind. I'll knock those out after it gets warm enough to go sailing (the snow needs to melt). After that ... no idea.Did I really need this? No. Do you? Probably not. But it's a bit of fun.

---

Later, after dinner, making a quick test jig, and grinding a cutter for 1/4-inch radius grooves....

One of my first projects is to be some wheel thimbles for my shroud tensioners. The Dyneema line is secured around a pin through two sharp-edged stainless plates. Chafe has been an issue, and the small radius of the pin is a concern. I could use a conventional thimble, but it would not center the line on the pin and thimbles can cut the rope. A wheel thimble solves both problems. I hacked this out of a bit of cutting board, so it is crude, but it proved the jig and the groove cutter. The cutter, BTW, was one I ground when I was 13, a full 50 years ago. It was still razor sharp and just right. I think it was originally for a bearing groove.

The grooves are intentionally deeper than a pulley, to keep the rope in place and to protect from chafe. The width is wrong--this was just a quick test. This is probably the correct width for the pin on the boat, but I need to measure.

It's working! It was so easy. I could make 10 of these in 30 minutes, each identical. The breaking load tested to be 700 pounds, and the WLL is probably about 200 pounds.

The once I ended up using on the boat (shroud tensioner tackle) are a little larger and have a WLL of about 250 pounds. Since the maximum load on this tackle is about 200 pounds, plastic works.  But for any high load application, I would use aluminum, which should match the WLL of the Dyneema.

 

 A metal lathe makes these easy, but you could make them with a drill press and a few files, or with a drill press-to-lathe conversion kit. The trick is to make a chisel that matches the groove bottom curve.

 

 

 

The final product:

• Centers the load (rope) on the pin.
• Protects the rope from both side chafe and pin chafe.
• Increases the pin radius. The D/d is increased from 1:1 to 3:1.

Much better than a thimble. Why there is no US distribution I can't guess. They are available for very heavy lifting applications.

 

 

 

  

Deadeyes Vs. Lashings

Rev. 1-18-2025

I recently got a new metal lathe. My last metal lathe crashed about 20 years ago and I;ve been bodging by with a wood lathe and drill press tricks. I have a few small projects in mind, and in addition to those, deadeyes caught my eye. Not the lignum verta sort of square riggers, but something small for Dyneema.

 

 

 

 

 

A halyard applied the tension and a single leg was tied off above the top block.

 

Aluminum should be the trick, or even Nylon for light load applications.

or what about Low friction rings or even big thimbles? Even high-end boats use these.

 

 

A turnbuckle on the Lagoon, vs. the thimble lashing on an Outremer 51.

But what I can't get my arms around, if Outremer and other high-end makers are OK with lashings, is what is the advantage of bespoke deadeyes? My gut is that they are a little easier to tension, but is that even true, if the lines all run the same way? Some mini-deadeyes would be cool and trick, but is there no point?

Some years ago I tested lashing efficiency for PS, comparing Colligo eyes with LFRs.  I couldn't measure enough difference to publish.

---

So I made some up on the lathe to investigate the strength of materials. HDPE is about as weak as you can get. I basically copied the Colligo dimensions and pull tested them first to 2200 pounds and then to failure at nearly 5000 pounds (the HDPE began to creep--no dramatic failure).

 

Easy enough to make on a lathe, but you will need a jig to hold them on an arbor using the deadeye holes. I can see why Colligo went with the teardrop shape; it reduces rotation when tightening the lashing.  Not a problem with a little more care, or if I had made the eye a little tighter (it was just a test stub of line with a preexisting eye, not one made up for this test).

 

If made from nylon they would be stronger than the Dyneema line. If I wanted to go from lashing to pin, without the encircling Dyneema eye, then aluminum would be required for the pin stress.

 

I may make some for some rigging mods down the line. Although I am sure nylon would work, I'll probably use 1/2-inch aluminum plate.  A little slower to turn, but not bad and permanent.

 

 

WAGO and pull out strength

 A little while ago the loss of control of a ship and destruction of the Key Bridge in Baltimore implicated a WAGO connector. It is not clear whether the connector failed or whether it was an installation error, which is actually far more likely (we all make mistakes). However, I do get questions about the suitability of Wago connectors for yachts. I tested them, along with several other types, and they answer is yes and maybe. They are good for some things, but not for small wires and not as good as some other things. Strain relief is is still vital.

I use Wagos for some things. I also solder very small wires, use crimps, and use pressure plate- and eye-type terminal strips. It all depends. And contrary to popular belief, USCG does permit wire nuts inside weatherproof enclosures. In fact, it is always a good idea to use an enclosure if ...

• There is any chance of loose gear coming in contact with the confections.
• If splashes are possible.
• To provide strain relic and vibration damaging.