I posted a little while back about picking up a small lathe, and working with it on various things, but something I hadn’t tried yet was threading something.
The lathe has interchangeable gears that can connect the chuck with the carriage, so you can have the carriage move at a known rate relative to the chuck turning. With that, you can use the lathe to cut threads.
I thought I should give that a try, and using a bit of scrap steel bar I picked up from the excellent OnlineMetals.com, I thought I’d try to make a “bolt” to match a random nut I had sitting in a drawer in my work bench. Here are the results!
Honestly, I ended up cutting the whole thing a little too narrow, so the nut is a *little* loose, but it still threads nicely, it’s not too loose that it will slide over the threads, so I think for a first try, it’s a pretty good result.
Granted also that this is an externally cut thread, which is much easier than cutting the inside. But I do have a bit more scrap bar stock, so I do plan to try to make a matching pair of an internal cut and an external cut.