This is the first lathe I’ve ever made. The goal of the 2.77: Precision Machine Design class I took in the Spring of 2018 was to design a t-base lathe deterministically. This was my first experience with deterministic design, and it mostly felt like being thrown into the waters of very precise error budgeting as a baby mechanical engineer. Now, after passing qualification exams, taking more machine design courses, and designing and disassembling tons of mechanisms, I would change a lot of my decisions.

This lathe is primarily made from Delrin because it is my favorite material to machine from. Though many mistakes were made, the resulting lathe was able to perform a 0.1 mm cut on an aluminum piece. The t-base lathe performed very well for a lathe that was made out of plastic. The measured values were close to the predicted values and could have been caused by either manufacturing or measurement mistakes. The functional requirement of 50µm was achieved with a 0.1mm cut with a peak-to-peak value of 25 µm.