A lathe somehow belongs in any sensible household.
Sometimes it does not stop there. Hopefully.
This is where I collect the machines that are actually used in my workshop or have found a new home here. Not as a collection of technical data sheets, but with their condition, their quirks, and the projects that grew from them.
Some arrived – or will arrive – because I need them for a specific job. Others are simply there at first and later become projects of their own. Repairs, modifications, and unusual uses therefore belong here just as much as the work they were originally built to do.
Emcomat 8.6
My small lathe – by now the foundation for a considerable part of WerkstattDenke.
When I bought it, there was no grand modification plan. I mainly wanted a lathe I could actually use. The first changes came later -and over time, individual improvements turned into a whole series of projects of their own.
The Emcomat was repaired, expanded, used as a milling machine or slow-motion shaper, and later equipped step by step with an electronic leadscrew. It even made many of the parts needed for its own modifications. Good little lathe, isn’t it?
By now, it is much more than just another machine in the workshop. It is a tool, a test platform, and occasionally the problem for which it then has to manufacture the solution itself.
More Machines
Other machines will get their place here once there is more to say about them than the manufacturer, nameplate, purchase date, and current owner.
This page is not meant to become a simple inventory list. A machine becomes interesting to me – and to WerkstattDenke – through its quirks, the work done with it, and the stories and projects that grow from it.