1. Gingery Book

Look up ‘concrete lathe’ and you’ll quickly find yourself reading the works of [David Gingery]. His series of books on building a machine shop from scrap begin with a charcoal foundry, and quickly move to creating a metal lathe out of concrete. Before [Gingery]’s lathe, around the time of World War I, many factories created gigantic machine tools out of concrete. It’s an old idea, but you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone with a shop featuring concrete machine tools. Cheap lathes are plentiful on Craigslist, after all.

Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap. Charcoal Foundry [Book 1 of 7] 003, 1-878087-00-2 David J. Gingery Publishing, 1983, 82, English, 37 Mb, pdf, GET. 128947, David Gingery Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap Build Your Own Metal Working Shop from Scrap. Metal Lathe [Book 2. @Mark Kravchenko,I did end up selling my gingery lathe and bought an Emco Maximat V10 lathe instead. At the time of selling the gingery lathe the half nut had not worn out yet but I did have to drill a hole into the cross slide to allow me to push a 1/4' pin through and lock the handle of the lock nut so that it didn't disengage.

Building a metal lathe from concrete is more of a challenge. This challenge was recently taken up by [Curt Filipowski] in a five part YouTube series that resulted in a real, working lathe made out of concrete, scrap, and a lot of bolts.

The concrete lathe begins with a form, and for this [Curt] cut out all the parts on a CNC router. Creating the form isn’t quite as simple as you would think – the concrete form included several bolts that would alow [Curt] to bolt bearings, ways made out of gas pipe, and angle iron. This form was filled with concrete in [Curt]’s kitchen, and after a nice long cure, the lathe was moved up to the upstairs shop. That’s a five hundred pound block moved up a flight of stairs by a single person.

Gingery Book

The rest of the build deals with the cast concrete carriage which rides along the polished gas pipe ways, a tool post holder milled out of a block of aluminum, and finally making some chips. While it’s not the most practical lathe – the carriage moves along the ways by turning a wheel underneath the tailstock – it does demonstrate a concrete lathe is possible.