Full disclosure. If you want a lathe capable of turning metal stock, you probably should just buy one. But what fun is that? You can do like [kachurovskiy] and build one with your 3D printer. If you are chuckling, thinking you can’t make 3D printed parts sturdy enough, you aren’t exactly wrong. [Kachurovskiy’s] trick is to 3D print forms and then cast the solid parts in concrete. The result looks great, and we don’t doubt his claim that it “can surpass many comparable lathes in rigidity and features.”
Even he admits that this is a “… hard, long, and expensive project…” But all good projects are. There’s a GitHub page with more details and informative videos below. The action shots are in the last video just before the six-minute mark. Around the seven-minute mark, you can see the machine cut a conical thread. Color us impressed!
The idea of casting concrete with inserts in it is giving us a number of ideas. We haven’t done it before, but it looks like a good skill to learn. You can 3D print concrete, too. Concrete lathes are, surprisingly, not a new idea, but much harder to do without 3D-printed forms.