My Little Machine Shop 4100 HiTorque mini lathe has been a great little machine, even though it does have a real shortcoming. Even though this is rated as being able to have a 7 inch swing, I’ve been lucky to make a cut on anything over about 1.5 inches in diameter. As much as a lot or things take place under 1 inch in diameter, it sure would be nice to be able to turn something bigger!
Here’s a link to the Little Machine shop Product catalog for this Lathe: https://littlemachineshop.com/products/product_related_au.php?ProductNumber=4100
The good news is that Little Machine shop has offers all the right bits and pieces to make this machine more useful. I used the 4450 Extended Cross Slide Travel Kit to take this Lathe from just a nice tool to have to something that is really useful! The Cross slide kit is listed to extend the travel by 1 inch, I think it’s actually much closer to 1.5” of travel gained.
This conversion is not too terribly difficult and really took a little over an hour to accomplish. It is worth noting that all of the fasteners on this little machine are metric. Not an issue, I just want you to know so that you, my viewer, are not guessing on which allen wrenches to use. There are some fasteners that are under 8mm and my normal wrench stops at 8mm. You’ll want to use a small crescent wrench for some of those smaller nuts on the adjusting hardware on the gibbs.
After getting this upgrade done I’m very pleased to see how much travel is really gained and how much more useful this is. I’ve got a seal driver that needed to be addressed and now I can do that easily with room to spare! I’m definitely looking forward to all the things that I can make with this lathe!
I found an inexpensive set of indexable carbide cutters on Amazon that really seem to do the job nicely. You can check them out here: https://amzn.to/3LKUxLc
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