This is a post about the tools and machinery that I use in my metal workshop. A little information about each, and what I paid for them. In no particular order:
Big disc sander- £200
This machine I bought new for £200. It’s a 12” disc, 1.5hp motor, and it’s a great addition to the shop. You see a lot of very similar designs at varying pricepoints- this one was at the more expensive end, because it’s entirely cast iron and has a rack and pinion table adjustment. Intended for woodwork, I put a 36 grit zirconium disc on it, and it eats steel up. Great for weld prep, truing up mitres, and rounding off corners.
Small disc sander- £30
Like many of my tools, this one came from Lidl- Lidl do astonishingly good tools, often manufactured for them by established tool companies. In this case, I suspect the sander was made by Proxxon, who do a lot of quality small engineering tools. Oddly, aside from Proxxon’s own disc sander, there’s really nothing else of this size on the market that doesn’t also have a belt sander, which I didn’t want. I got this specifically for smoothing the edges of my identity tags, and it’s so so much quicker than the old days of clamping each one in the vice and rounding them off with an angle grinder.
Bench grinder- £20
This is the most powerful motor in my shop, at 2hp. It’s extremely old and heavy and, I think because of that, I got it on ebay for £20. On one side I have a standard 8” coarse grinding disc, for sharpening lathe tools and larger drill bits, and on the other I have a wire wheel, which is great for cleaning up parts, deburring, derusting, depainting, and so on. I’ve thought about wiring it up properly with an emergency stop, but that would be of limited utility because it takes a full minute to stop spinning after it’s turned off. Probably the most dangerous machine in the shop.
Lidl drill press- £150
This was a purchase of convenience. I drill a lot of small holes, all the same size, for all the identity tags I make. I have a much nicer and much older small drill press, but it needs a new motor, and that’s a whole thing because motors now have standardised metric mounting points that do not marry up with 70 year old drills. I needed something right now, and for what I got it for, it’s fine. However, I wouldn’t recommend it as your only drill press. The head doesn’t come down far enough, and it’s lacking in torque. The cast v-groove in the baseplate ought to make cross drilling round stock extremely easy, but I was not able to get the drill on centre with it. Fine for the production drilling of small holes that I do, but I wouldn’t get it as an all round drill press. One of the few Lidl tools I’ve not been super impressed with.
Roll bender- Around £100 worth of purchased parts, plus a bunch of scrap that would have been fairly expensive if bought new
This is the mark II rollbender, which I built myself. It’s modelled after the ridiculously masculine “swag hulk off road” or something, only that uses 6mm steel for its sidewalls, and I used 12 because it’s what I had; it uses 12mm axles and I used 25mm; however they both use a 2 tonne bottlejack to generate the bending force. I’ve not tested the maximum capacity of this yet, but the one it’s based on can bend 50x50x3mm square tube, so it ought to be able to manage that and more. (in addition to the slightly embarrassing name of the swag hulk off road, it also costs around £800, plus about £150 for each set of dies you want for it, so it was never an option).
Horizontal bandsaw- £136
Another ebay purchase, my friend and I drove out to Colchester to collect it. We went to Colchester Zoo while we were there, which was a great time; we saw sealions. This is a standard 4x6 horizontal bandsaw, in that it’ll cut material of up to 4” high and 6” wide. It’s a really common design that you can buy from lots of different brands. Last time I checked they’re about £350 new.
I have had to make a number of modifications to this saw, and it’s a pain to cut mitres on because of how the vice works. Now, though, having switched to good quality vari-tooth blades, got the blade guides running correctly, and added a flood coolant system, it really is a beast. Rather than doing all that I might have upgraded to a better saw, but there’s nothing better quality that isn’t also much much bigger. I built a trolley for this one, and now it lives under the bench and comes out when I need it. It can also be used as a conventional vertical bandsaw, but I’ve not yet had need to set it up like that. I have a project coming up that might need it, though.
Small abrasive saw- £50
Another Lidl purchase, I really like this saw. There’s no beating the bandsaw for heavy stock cutting, but when you have something small to cut to length quickly, or something that’s too hard for the bandsaw, this thing is great. It’s an 8” disc- 12” is standard in saws like this. I wouldn’t want to do anything accurate in it, but for coarse cutting it’s really great.
Oil cooled welder- £80
I started welding with an old buzzbox style AC welder my cousin gave me. They’re a fine way to start welding, but their duty cycle- that’s the amount of time it can spend working before it overheats- is too low for serious work. That same cousin told me about oil cooled welders, which are catastrophically reliable, and archaic, so I found this one on ebay for £80 at a garage in Cambridgeshire. The same friend from the essex adventure and I drove out to collect it, and then spent the night with a friend in Cambridge. Another fine tool adventure!
It’s a Pickhill Bantam, made by Pickhill Engineering in Yorkshire, a family run company that still exists, making transformers and such. It doesn’t have fine control, but it goes up to 180amps, and will run 3.25mm electrodes all day without getting more than pleasantly warm. It’s also not filled with carcinogenic oil, which is something you have to watch out for in some of these old welders. It will outlive us all.
Mig welder- £800ish
This is the Cros-Arc 291c, a 250a MIG/SMAW welder. I bought it new from my local welding supplier, Ian at Associated Welding Supplies in Croydon. I needed a welding process that was better for thinner materials, and I’d initially planned to get a TIG machine when I had the time to learn TIG. A year after I decided on that, I was no closer to having the time to learn TIG so I bought this instead. I’d sneered a bit at MIG in the past because it’s quite easy to do, but that’s a ridiculous attitude quite honestly. I love this machine- it’s duty cycle is 60% at 250a, but I don’t go anywhere near that kind of current, so it’s basically 100% for everything I do with it. It’s an inverter machine, rather than the traditional transformer kind. MIG is a lot of outlay- the machines have a lot more going on with them mechanically that can go wrong, so you want a good quality one, and then you need to buy gas, which for a half height bottle like I use (of 5% CO2 Argon) is around £200, though £80 is returnable on the bottle- but when you’ve got that taken care of, it’s very cheap to run, and it’s a great welding process for the kind of thing I do. Also, for all that it’s easy to stick two bits of metal together, it takes a bit of skill to do that in a way that looks nice, and since I’ve started MIG welding my stick welding has improved as a result.
Rotabeast (big homemade drill press)- £110 head, £100 table, plus a bunch o’ scrap
This is one of my favourite machines. It’s a mag drill head, which I got on ebay for about £110 because it wasn’t working properly- new, that mag drill (RotaBest RB50x) would have been around £900. In this case, it was the magnet that was the problem, so I took it out of the equation and just mounted the head straight onto a pedestal that I built for it, from a piece of old I-beam that came out of my friend’s house (and was replaced with a much better i-beam, don’t worry). It’s a 1.5hp motor with two speeds, gear driven, noisy as hell, and will put a 12mm hole through 10mm of mild steel in 8 seconds with no pilot hole. It has an MT2 spindle taper, which means I can fit it with a drill chuck, or annular cutter holder, or any other thing I might fancy. Using an annular cutter, its maximum capacity is a 50mm hole through 50mm steel plate, again with no pilot hole or other preparation.
It’s had a couple of different iterations- most recently, I reinforced the column to stop it twisting, and added a compound table which I got on ebay for £100. Ideally it needs a flood coolant system, but that can wait until I have a job that needs a lot of annular cutting.
Plasma cutter- £200
This is a generic 50amp plasma cutter from China. It works just fine, but I had to figure out a lot of it for myself, as the manual was completely useless. Now, I have it set up on this pantograph table I built, and it’s tremendously useful. I can make a template on the bandsaw in the woodshop, and 10 minutes later have it cut out of steel plate. (a note, if you want to get a plasma cutter, you’ll also need a compressor to run it, though I understand self contained units do exist).
Lathe- £450
A Leinen D23LZ. German made in 1938, I bought this lathe on ebay for around £450. The same friend whose house I got the i-beam from drove out with me to Deep North Norfolk to collect it. The previous owner had had it about 15 years and not used it much, and he’d got it from a local engineer who’d had it for 50 years. It’s a real beast; the mini lathe I had before was alright, but once you’ve used a properly heavy, rigid machine, you won’t want to go back. The nice thing about it being German is that it’s all metric, which makes life a great deal easier. I intend to get it set up with a vertical milling table, though at the moment it’s possible to do extremely cursory milling by clamping a part in the toolpost.
Previously, I had a modern Mini Lathe, which was a good start, but not really big or rigid enough for what I needed. This was a huge upgrade that actually cost less than a new mini lathe.
Bench Shear- £150
I saw an advert for this and bought it. It’s about the only time an advert has worked on me like that. It’s from Axminster Tools, and made by Ehoma, which is a Taiwanese company. It’s really well made, much better than the generic ones that you can get for a little less money. I got it mainly for making identity tags- it’s so much quicker than cutting up little bits of steel like that on the bandsaw. It’s bolts into this bench that I made and bolted to the floor, specially for it and my arbour press since they require so much leverage.
Arbour press- £46
Another ebay purchase, this is a generic 2tonne arbour press, which I use mainly for stamping the letters into my tags. It’s also useful now for making small rings, and other stuff that needs a little judicious application of pressure.
Compressor- £100
(Ignore the surrounding tools- this is an old picture because I forgot to take one of the compressor when I did the others) Lidl again! There’s not much to say about this, but it works well and was a good price. Plus everything from Lidl has a 3 year warranty. I also got a retractable air hose reel from there, which lets me get compressed air to anywhere in the shop.
Angle grinders- various, £20-35
I have four angle grinders, to save time in changing over accessories. The best ones are the Erbauer (which I think is a Screwfix house brand) and the Lidl one. The Hitachi one is fine, and the yellow machine mart one is pretty rough. Having them set up and ready to go like this is super helpful, so I built them this rack.
Edited because I forgot:
Manual metal bender- £150
This is a great tool. It lets me bend steel bars of up to 50x8mm, and that very often saves time over cutting and welding them to shape. It’s bolted to the floor, and there isn’t really a way of using it if you don’t have that option. It’s great, though- the fancy Harlequin Works sign is made of letters bent up on this.
And that’s most of my tools and machinery! There’s plenty more hand tools and such that I use, but this is the obvious stuff. if you have any questions, leave a comment or, if you’re on twitter, ask me there. I hope you enjoyed this pictorial tour!