A Heavy-Duty DIY Lathe

Many Tormach customers start out by designing and building homemade CNC devices. Whether they’re retrofitting a manual mill or piecing together components to make a lathe. This week, we stumbled onto a metal lathe made out of concrete on Instructables. In fact, one of our founders, Greg Jackson, had a thesis in college that focused on adding concrete to drill press columns and cataloging the rigidity changes. While concrete can provide some similar properties to casting – some commercial machines even use a polymer concrete cast frame – it can fall short in a number of ways. Concrete has a tendency to heat up during the mixing and pouring process, which leads to cooling and shrinking as the material dries.

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Also, while some concrete sets up fairly quickly, the material continues to dry over a long period of time, sometimes for decades. These characteristics lead to challenges when working to build a machine tool with any sort of precision. Regardless, it’s pretty cool to see fabrication enthusiasts building their own tools. And, while this Instructables author started with this lathe as a manual tool, he plans to add CNC capabilities. Of course at that point, we would recommend turning to a real CNC lathe, like our 15L Slant-PRO.

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