Originally Posted by springer

Depending on how adventursome you are, you might be able to find a Craftsman AA lathe. Sears sold them from the 30's into the 50's, nice little table top lathe with half inch spindle. Biggest problem is it uses 0 morse taper fittings, which are tough to find locally, but I found that a lot of Taig stuff works fine on mine. I paid $150 for mine at a flea market a few years ago. I would probably go with a Taig if I didn't have mine. The Harbor Freight 4x10 lathes have been popular for a while and there are a good number of sites with hints and tips on how to use them.

All these are expensive options.

I used to have a Black Decker drill with all sorts of attachments except a decent lathe. It also sold a drill press and they were sold so cheaply. Unfortunately, they are no longer available and my attachements had gone missing and my drill press had broken up, trying to fix it somehow.

So now I am stuck with hand drilling and sawing, but cuts down my precision a lot. If I can increase my drilling precison to 0.5mm, I would love it very much.

Instead of discouraging the developments of small multi tools that cannot do all the proper jobs as good as specialised tools, we should try to make these multi tools work by recommending improvement work on them.

Unimat 1 is even better than Black and decker drill attachments although a strong drill is much more useful than a specialised 12V motor that may not last long.

If the chinese copy the Unimat 1 design, then, I applaud them. Especially in making them cheaply and thus widely available.

One trick that I used in working with cheap drills is to use better drill bits. These chinese copies are poor in making drill bits and saws that last long. However metal objects that don't need any movement and friction should be alright.

Of course an all metal Unimat like the Unimat ML would be even better.

Any supplier of the drill attachment for saws that fit onto the Black Decker table? I still have the table. I intend to use it to support polystyrene sheets when sawing/cutting them in pieces.

I am tempted to buy the Unimat clone. It will be the achievement of a childhood dream before I die, in working with a lathe.

As mentioned earlier, you can build a 8" x 12" precision metal lathe using a hand drill and files. It will drill and bore with precision.

Get the foundry book and the lathe book by David Gingery, and follow the instructions.

If you don't have a drill press you can still drill accurate square to surface holes with a drill guide made by drilling a few different size holes (to accommodate common drill sizes) in a block of aluminum or steel on someone else's drill press.

In all drilling operations, to get accurate hole locations you need to center punch, and step drill out. This applies to hand drills and drill press's alike.

You can even make a drill guide without access to a drill press if you strap your drill to a bench top on a formed block with hose clamps, making sure the drill bit is parallel to the table top. Add some temporary wood rails on the bench under the bit to guide your block and slide the block into the bit, using the rails as guides. With this block as a guide you can then drill square to surface holes with the hand drill.

Making a basic lathe is as simple as fixing a hand drill to a bench top, and making a simple tailstock attached to the bench surface.

If you dress up the above rails and block drilling procedure, it IS a lathe. The block can become a tailstock if you fit it with a homemade center, since you drilled it parallel with the bench surface.

I've just purchased a Proxxon drill and stand,good solid machine for smaller size stuff.I'll be getting more of the range as the budget allows.The stand allows the drill to be at any angle..there may be a lathe in there somewhere.
Stuart

Originally Posted by othmanskn

So now I am stuck with hand drilling and sawing, but cuts down my precision a lot. If I can increase my drilling precison to 0.5mm, I would love it very much.

Instead of discouraging the developments of small multi tools that cannot do all the proper jobs as good as specialised tools, we should try to make these multi tools work by recommending improvement work on them.

Unimat 1 is even better than Black and decker drill attachments although a strong drill is much more useful than a specialised 12V motor that may not last long.

I am tempted to buy the Unimat clone. It will be the achievement of a childhood dream before I die, in working with a lathe.

I know someone who used a clone Unimat 1 for small scale production R/C car chassis, I can tell you that the clone machines can do much better than 0.5mm precision in drill press mode. I used to spend hours trying to get holes drilled with 0.01mm accuracy (or the car won't so straight!), which I can now do in minutes. In this instance I don't think the clone is any worse than the real thing. The only place the Unimat 1 (real or clone) falls down is milling metals, it just flexes a bit too much, even my ML takes a long time to do anything useful. The lathe part is acceptable, it requires very light cuts, but for hobby use where speed isn't especially important, it can produce perfectly acceptable results.

The motors are actually 6v I think (Unimat1), standard RS380 types, but it's not hard to adapt a 540 (as per Unimat PL), or an old drill motor etc.

And yes, by all logic there should be a huge community of HK 6in1 users posting their work and mods.