Mechanical operations are performed by several machines depending on the type of product to be manufactured, both at industrial and laboratory levels. These machines can be both manual actuated or operate automatically and the lathe machine falls inside this category, which is used to work on revolutionary pieces. This thesis work concerns with the description and analysis of all the features implemented aiming to automate a lathe machine: starting from a manual instrument, the goal of the work is to modify it in order to obtain a low-cost automatic machine able to perform lathing operations in a didactic laboratory environment. The project can be subdivided into 3 main goals.