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Fawteen -- I'll suggest Volume 1 of Machine Tool Operation, written by Axelrod and Burghardt and published by McGraw-Hill, which I consider to be one of the very best basic machine shop textbooks books ever written. It's been out of print for a number of years, but there were lots of copies printed and it's fairly available in the used book marketplace. (Still, I'll suggest borrowing a copy from your local library, on an inter-library loan if necessary, to see if Axelrod and Burghardt's style of teaching fits your style of learning before you put the effort into hunting down a used copy.) There were several editions, any one of them published between say World War II and the late 1960's should meet your need. Another excellent book covering lathe operation, this one still in print, is Machine Shop Practice written by Karl Moltrecht and published by Industrial Press. I'm pretty sure that when Moltrecht wrote his book he thought he was writing a mechanical engineering textbook, but he does a superb job building a tradesman-level foundation before getting to the production-engineering considerations. Amazingly, Machine Shop Practice sells for a very low price; the major mail-order machine shop suppliers (MSC, Travers Tool, KBC, Enco, and so on) and the mail-order booksellers usually offer both volumes separately for about US$ 25 apiece. Finally, the "classic" is How to Run a Lathe, originally written for and published by South Bend Lathe Company. Needless to say, it focuses on South Bend lathes exclusively, but it's still an excellent little book for the learner. The last I heard, South Bend was getting somewhere around US$ 20 for the latest edition (which still shows its age), but Linsay Publications sells a reprint of a World War II vintage edition that you can probably get for around US$ 10 including shipping. Another thought: Hendy was considered one of the US's premier makers of lathes, known for both their strength and precision. One thing Hendy did that most other makers didn't do is fit a reversing mechanism and single-dog clutch to their leadscrew so that the "half-nuts" did not need to be disengaged at the end of a threading cut. Instead, the leadscrew's direction of rotation was reversed so that the carriage was retracted under power. Because the half-nuts remained engaged to the leadscrew throughout the thread-cutting process, there was no need to have a "threading dial" to tell the lathe operator when to re-engage the half-nuts. Most other-make lathes used a threading dial, and that's what the textbooks teach when it comes to threading on a lathe. Once you're ready to try cutting threads, I suggest that you post a question asking for guidance on using the Hendy leadscrew-reversing system at either the Practical Machinist (www.practicalmachinist.com) or Home Shop Machinist (www.homeshopmachinist.net and the click on the link to BBS). Finally, spend some time at this website:>Link John>Link
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