Threading for beginners | The Hobby-Machinist

I have never been able to decipher those charts on the import mills either!

Don’t overthink the treading too much, when you first start you will make mistakes! Get some stock and do lots of practice cuts, get familiar with how your machine acts and keep at it for awhile before you actually cut threads on a part you spent hours machining and ruin it!

I’ve been cutting threads for several years and I still screw it up sometimes! I finally bought a set of thread wires recently, but still haven’t used them.

When practicing just try to get the threads to fit in a nut without too much slop at first also remember to take small depth cuts with each pass.

Perfection comes with experience!


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk The photos of the lathe showing the charts on it appear to only show feed per revolution in both imperial and metric. There should be additional charts that show threading combinations. The layout of the gear train appears to show that the lathe is capable of changing gears to achieve different rates of advance of the lead screw per revolution. What make and model lathe is it? Did you get the lathe new? Did it come with any additional change gears? Do you have a manual for use of the lathe? All the information you need to change thread pitch is in those charts.

In image # the lower part of the chart (white) is for threads per inch.
The upper part of the chart (blue) shows the gears and locations for them to produce the pitches listed below .

Image # shows a simplified map of your lathe's gear train. Your lathe will also have a means of adjusting the gear train to accommodate different diameters of gears.

It's a dirty job, bring an nice rag out. In school machine shop, the teacher showed us how to grind a tool to fit the fishtail gage, how to set it up in the lathe, using the fishtail gage and how to set the tool on center using the point of the tailstock center; we learned how to set up the QC for the thread we wanted to cut, and just went at it, using only a appropriate nut to gage the fit. I hardly ever use thread wires, they are a pain in the butt! If a thread is fussy for fit, I use a thread micrometer, they are much easier to use than wires, and can be bought used for not a terrible amount of money. Do not waste your cash on insert threading tools, they break way too easily, I use HSS tools made by Aloris, they are sharpened only on top and last a very long time.