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Milling cast on a mini mill

F

Feeop

Member
Hey folks. I was given a mini lathe 7x12 by a friend's family and it's mint, except for the base of the tailstock. The grove is too small for the rail so I will have to mill in on my mini mill. Any suggestions beside getting a better lathe. (Baby steps). Zoom in on the pic to see.

Cheers & Thx
 

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Welcome to the forum. There are a lot of helpful people here, though few have much interest in, or affection for 7x lathes! :)
That tailstock tilt is a pretty common 'feature' of the Vevor 7x lathes made by Realbull, which is what yours looks like, from the picture you posted.
If you use Facebook, the 7x lathe group has lots of discussions of this.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/7xminilathe/
Thre is also a good groups.io 7x lathe group https://groups.io/g/7x12MiniLathe
A lot of Vevor users don't find that it is a big problem when using the lathe, others go to quite a bit of work to make it 'look right'. Have you checked (and tried to adjust) the tailstock alignment? You will be lucky if that's the only thing that needs attention on your lathe - there may be other things like headstock misalignment, carriage binding due to varying thickness of the ways, loose and bent gibs, mis-aligned leadscrew supports which can cause binding and damaged change gears, loose motor pulleys or loose/mis-aligned motor, etc... I owned a Vevor 7x14 and found most of those problems on mine. The tailstock 'problem' didn't make it to the top of the list before I hit the 'too many lathes' issue - I already had a MicroMark Sieg 7x14 and then got a 9x24 lathe, so I sold the Vevor. I thought it was basically OK for a 7x lathe (larger motor and larger spindle flange and chuck than the Sieg machines) once the lack of quality control issues were dealt with. I did quite a bit of work with mine.
 
Thanks for the replies. I finally had a chance to get working on it and it won't power up so back it goes.
 
Feeop said:
Thanks for the replies. I finally had a chance to get working on it and it won't power up so back it goes.
Click to expand...
You may be missing somthing obvious, if you haven't used that type of lathe before.
If-as you said- it was a gift, then it's the ideal no-risk DIY project.
Perhaps not your thing, though.
 
There is a specific way of powering the lathe up. E.g. you have to have speed set to zero, and the fwd/red in neutral. And of course the safety/panic switch set properly as well.
 
gerritv said:
There is a specific way of powering the lathe up. E.g. you have to have speed set to zero, and the fwd/red in neutral. And of course the safety/panic switch set properly as well.
Click to expand...
And some lathes (not my Vevor, though) have a switch in the hinge of the 'safety shield' so they won't start unless the shield is lowered. That switch can usually be jumpered on the controller board.
 
I had a safety shield on my new lathe but found it was more of a hinderance for the work that I do.

Since I am the only user it is a non issue to remove it. However if this was a multi-user shop it would stay in place.
 
Feeop said:
Hey folks. I was given a mini lathe 7x12 by a friend's family and it's mint, except for the base of the tailstock. The grove is too small for the rail so I will have to mill in on my mini mill. Any suggestions beside getting a better lathe. (Baby steps). Zoom in on the pic to see.

Cheers & Thx
Click to expand...
While a shaper would work, so would a 45 degree angle set-up.

And you can arrange that under a limited clearance mill a lot easier!

But the real question would be, what will that do for the alignment of the tailstock spindle, and what can of worms gets opened up by re-cutting the Vee notch to make the tailstock base sit flat on the rear ways?

Getting the base to fit the ways is the easy part. Getting the rest of the tailstock back in to alignment, is where the head scratching will begin!
 
Thanks everyone for all the help. I reached out to a supplier and it appears it's still under warranty. So to ease up on time (shipping back and forth) , I'll trouble shoot the electrical and they will provide whatever parts are needed (including the tailstock base). Should be easy enough (said way too many people).

Thanks again
Cheers
 
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