Yes you certainly can. If you get a horizontal facing cutter it will work this way. But you will have a lot of fiddling about to raise the work up on packing pieces every time you want to take another cut.

The more common way of milling in the lathe is to invest in a vertical slide that bolts on to the cross slide and holds the workpiece, or a small vice. Milling is then done by an endmill held in the lathe chuck.

Yet another budget way around the problem is to make a fly cutter, basically a piece of square bar held in the four jaw chuck with a hole drilled in it to hold a lathe tool bit and a grub screw to hold the bit in place. Work is then clamped to the cross slide, or to an angle plate that is bolted to the cross slide and faced off using the makeshift cutter.

There is a book in the Workshop Practice series called something like Milling in the Lathe that might be of more help to you.

Don't forget too that if you just want to do flat facing work, the job is often best mounted on the face plate using clamps and or angle brackets (easily made from angle iron scraps) and turned in the conventional facing manner.

The drummond round bed was particularly good at this. You could angle the cross-slide by rotating the saddle around the bed to achieve different depths of cut.

Neil

Nick,

Is this a function of cutting load as the tool moves across the face, or maybe the cross slide being deflected more the further away from the central position? Maybe 'spring' cuts are required for many more facing operations than most think?

.

Dr. Schlesinger would be turning in his grave, if he knew that his ideals are so abused by "many" manufacturers and/or misunderstood by "many" users.

Schlesinger's concept of 'slightly concave' differed greatly from that applied to your "Many lathes", Nick.

What he specified represents 'flat, to slightly concave' [i.e. just sufficient to ensure 'not convex']

I will leave you to find the numbers: But if the lathe is set to turn sufficiently concave that it presents a real problem with milling … There is something seriously wrong with [or, for the Politically Correct, 'special about'] the lathe.

MichaelG.

I do believe that even the Myford is set to turn slightly concave and that has not stopped thousands of users making use of it for milling. As michael says it is so slight most of us would have a job measuring it.

Horizontal milling in a lathe – My worry would be the support of the arbor provided by the tailstock. Anything but the lightest cut would concern me and as for climb milling………..

I have happily used a cutter held in a three jaw chuck with the work on a vertical slide on many occasions. I do try to remember to check if the cutter is coming loose though. A better option would be to use a proper holder and draw bar but I have yet to make the draw bar.

I do not understand why the miniscule concavity should be an issue.

JA

Michael,

I'm fully aware that the concavity is tiny, and I know why this was done, but this still equates to out of tram, the beauty of a mill is that you can tram it for visually perfect results where the paths of large cutters overlap, I assume from your attitude to this feature that you're also relaxed about tramming your mill

Nick

Thanks to this thread I have learnt a new word:

"tram, vb, trams, tamming, trammed, to adjust (a mechanism) to a fine degree of accuracy" Collins English Dictionary.

JA

I'm surprised no-one has pointed out that lathes were not designed for milling and produced a signed scroll from the original designer stating this and assuming this constitutes proof it can't be done

The lathe, specially in the model engineers workshop has been, and still is considered a universal tool, and if you can work out how to do a job on it, what ever it is, then that's OK. Aside from turning, it can be used as a mill, or used as a shaper/planer for cutting key ways,and I suppose you can cut gears the same way.

Ian S C