metal lathe

A milling machine would be better suited for slotting or milling guards.
A lathe is for turning.
BB
 
for guards you can check on a mini mill. a friend has an enco along with a large mill. we use the enco for the small quick jobs and it works great. its small enough i can even take it with me.
 
To use that to mill slots you would need some kind of vice and an adapter to mount it to the cross slide. You would then just need to purchase the correct end mills for the job. I'm not 100% sure that you can mount a vice to a mini lathe.
 
You can turn in a mill better than you can mill on a lathe. You will be happier with a mill for your guards. And pins can be turned from your mill spindle with a lathe tool in your vice.
 
if you really wanted to you could use the tool holder as a vice and put an endmill in the chuck, but you would be limited to the width of the endmill for the slot, which will probably cut about .005-.010 over ,as you'd be limited to just x and z axis. you could get shim stock to place under the part as you needed to increase the width but that's a lot of head ache. you might as well just use a file. a lathe is very limited to just round work, turning ods, boring ids, grooves and threads. not too much on a knive is perfectly round requiring lathe work. mills are great in a knife shop, slotting guards, milling finger cuts in a guard, squaring handle mat., drilling holes, tapping holes, blade bevels, inlays for name plates, and the list goes on and on.
 
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