LATHE AND OPERATIONS ON IT

LATHE:-

A lathe is a machine tool which turns cylindrical material, touches a cutting tool to it, and cuts the material.The purpose of a lathe is to rotate a part against a tool whose position it controls. It is useful for fabricating parts and/or features that have a circular cross section. 

A typical lathe consists of bed, head stock, tail stock, tool post, carriage and feeding mechanism. Lathe is capable of performing a number of operations. 

Operations that can be performed on lathe are:-

1.)Straight turning:
Straight turning, sometimes called cylindrical turning, is the process of reducing the work diameter to a specific dimension as the carriage moves the tool along the work.

2.)Step Turning: 
It is an operation of producing various steps of different diameters of in the work piece.This operation is carried out in the similar way as straight turning.

3.)Facing:
Facing is the producing of a flat surface as the result of a tool's being fed across the end of the rotating workpiece.Facing is machining the ends and shoulders of a piece of stock smooth. flat, and perpendicular to the lathe axis. Facing is used to cut work to the desired length and to produce a surface from which accurate measurements may be taken. 

4.)Boring

Boring is enlarging an existing hole. The hole can be a drilled, molded, cast or a forged hole. The work piece is placed in the lathe chuck and will be spinning while the boring tool is slowly driven into the opening. Boring tools are cylindrical in shape and will have a cutting tool protruding from them. Two different boring tools can be mounted together to make two different cuts at one time.

5.)Parting:

• Parting is the operation by which one section of a workpiece is severed from the remainder by means of a cutoff tool.

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6.)Threading:

Lathe provided the first method for cutting threads by machines. Although most threads are now produced by other methods, lathes still provide the most versatile and fundamentally simple method.

7.)Knurling:
Knurling is a manufacturing process, typically conducted on a lathe, whereby a visually-attractive diamond-shaped (criss-cross) pattern is cut or rolled into metal. This pattern allows human hands or fingers to get a better grip on the knurled object than would be provided by the originally-smooth metal surface.

8.)Drilling:
Frequently, holes will need to be drilled using the lathe before other internal operations can be completed, such as boring, reaming, and tapping. Although the lathe is not a drilling machine, time and effort are saved by using the lathe for drilling operations instead of changing the work to another machine.