Backyard Metal Casting and Machine Tool Building

Ok. This home-shop metalworking stuff is getting better and better the more we look into it!  Just in the past day we've come across several backyard and home-shop metalworking websites where people with creative minds are casting molten metal and building machine tools from materials sourced from other people's trash. There are people out there who have a passion for this stuff and they are proving that with a little ingenuity, resourcefulness and persistence you can do great things with little money. And thankfully the internet makes it easy to hook up with these people and learn their methods.

The website Backyard Metal Casting is a gem of a resource. Check it out. If you are into the ShopKulture lifestyle you'll love it.

A home shop operation that can cast metal parts and then machine those parts into precision pieces can build or repair just about anything. And if you are building and salvaging stuff it seems reasonable that you'd want to use your skills to furnish your own shop with affordable tools and equipment . In any case, it sure looks like a lot of fun.

A lathe is said to be the heart of a good metalworking operation. If you want to make some serious parts (and maybe you've got some fresh metal castings in need of machining) you'll want to have one. Serious lathes start at around $3000 and go up from there quickly. Even used lathes are usually well over $1000. Did you know that it's possible to build your own lathe from scrap metal and used automotive parts? This won't get you a "tool room", high precision, piece of equipment, but with some care it will get you a machine that is accurate enough to make parts for all those shop tools and equipment we were talking about building and salvaging for pennies on the dollar.

A few good resources for lathe building information are the Open Source Machine website and MultiMachineYahoo Group, and the books of David G. Gingery available from Lindsays' Technical Books. Just from the looks of it we like the MultiMachine information best, but we think there's a lot to learn from Gingery's approach too. That and Gingery has other plans for making bandsaws, drill presses, milling machines and a bunch of other stuff. Here's a list.

If you are just learning machining, you'll know a whole lot more after you build these projects. There's nothing like hands-on experience to teach lasting knowledge. And we figure that once we have some fundamental shop tools working we'll be able to figure out how to put them to work to bring in some cash so that we can afford to buy a fine old (factory built) South Bend Lathe and a Bridgeport milling machine.