pic: Chassis Idea

[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Turning down the ends of shafts on a lathe takes one tool.

Drilling and tapping the ends takes three: a center drill, the drill bit, then the tap.

On a manual lathe, it's faster to turn the ends down.

# of tools is kind of an unfair comparison here. Drilling the ends of a piece of stock is probably the simplest operation you can do on a manual lathe. No zeroing (assuming your going to just do a rough estimate of depth because your tapping the hole anyway) and no measuring of the piece to ensure correct diameter.

My guess is that the lathe operations would take close to the same amount of time for both kinds of axle, including the tool change for the drill. The tapping will cause the dead axle to take a longer amount of time, but we're talking about a matter of minutes which I do not feel is enough to justify changing a design from dead to live. There are a ton of other considerations obviously, but I just wanted to point that out.

-Brando