Rent a Bridgeport

[Lance]

I was shopping craigslist and found this the other day while looking for a lathe or mill.
http://houston.craigslist.org/tld/3378898171.html
The thought of it has opened up many horizons for me and my 3n1 that has been holding me back.
While the 3n1 has a large swing it is choked by the table size and limits toolpost clearance to about a max 6" dia.
A few of the engines I really want to build have 8-10" flywheels. While being able to turn the hubs and and get them mounted on mandrels at home, I had no way to face them.
Now if I can do all of this at home, take them trued up on mandrels, 1 or 2 hours I should be able to knock out what I can't do at home.
I'm going to check it out this weekend and see what they have, hopefully not a bunch of worn junk.
I'm excited.

 

[Cogsy]

An interesting concept, but at the rate at which I work I could buy a dozen flywheels for the cost of the rental time to make 1

 

[Herbiev]

That makes $60.00 for a couple of hours and $2000 return airfare Perth to Texas

 

[n4zou]

Large U.S. Military Bases have have extensive Hobby and Automotive shops available for the use of active duty personal. These shops included complete metal and wood working equipment. The cost was $20 a year. The wood and automotive shop was always crowded with people but the machine shop hardly ever got any use at all. I ended up using the machine shop to make parts for equipment in the engineering spaces of the Destroyer I was on at the time. The Ships Machinist was never around when the ship was in-port and we could never do repairs that involved dissembling the equipment while at sea. Whenever anyone else was using the machine shop they were doing the same thing I was doing, making or repairing the ships equipment.