My Mini Machine Shop For years I wanted to learn to do a little machine work on a lathe and milling machine. There were numerous occasion when I needed some minor machine work done to finish a project that I was working on. I am lucky that I have a friend with a lathe and milling machine who was always more than happy to do my machine work for me. But I wanted to be able to do it myself. For a long time I had been thinking about purchasing one of the small mini-lathes that I had seen offered by Harbor Freight, Grizzly, Homier, Cummins, and other tool suppliers. I was working on the restoration of a hit and miss engine that required more parts to be made than I felt was reasonable to ask my friend to do. That pushed me over the edge. Turned out the week of February 20, 2006, Cummins tools was in town. I ended up buying their version of the mini-lathe shown here. I had done a lot of reading and studying-up on these Asian made lathes. It was easy to conclude that they were by no means industrial quality lathes, but I figured that they would peform all of the lathing operations that I would need. I have not been disappointed. I found out very quickly that buying the lathe was just a start. I also had to have some tooling. Though the Cummins lathe came with everything I needed to get started, I ordered a variety of tools for turning, facing, and drilling. Below are a couple pictures of my first machined parts.      Seemed that the perfect combination for my mini-lathe would be a mini-mill. Though my mill is also a Cummins, sometime after I bought my lathe Cummins changed the color of their tools to blue. So, they don't match. I got my mini-mill for Christmas, 2006. Several weeks before Christmas I started gathering tools for the mill. Though my lathe came with a few essential tools to get started, the mill didn't come with any tools. Just tooling up the mill with a few essentials ended up costing nearly as much as the mill did. In fact, in the last six months I've spent far more on tools than on the original mill. My first project was this oscillating steam engine. My second engine is a sliding valve steam/air engine. My current project is building a replica of Henry Ford's first prototype internal combustion engine. You can follow my progress here.This project is requiring considerably more machine work than anything else I've done so far. ...Back...