Lots of Pics so go for a coffee or snack.
I often turn small pieces of wood in my lathe by just using the normal tool post and tool steel sharpened to have plenty of rake. I thought I would make this rig to do wood turning in the more traditional way.
Gadget consists of piece of steel plate with a hub attached by screws coming in from underneath. The bar is fitted over a pin and welded, the pin is held in place in the hub by a stainless socket head cap screw. The bar makes good contact with the hub for support.
You can see the newspaper where the join line is of the two pieces of wood. Wood turning drive centre can be seen.
Action shot. The chisel set is only a cheapie, I found that I had to sharpen a better edge and oilstone them to improve cutting ability. After sharpening and oilstoning they cut very well.
I tried a few different chisels to get the hang of it. That's a proper wood turning running centre.
Getting there, hey this is fun. Because the chisel support bar is only mild steel I found that the sharp corners of the chisel shanks would dig in so I stoned the sharp edges so they would slide without digging in to the mild steel.
Wood turning sure makes a mess, but it sucks up pretty well with the vacuum cleaner.
No matter how hard I tried I couldn't get a good parallel surface, I could get fairly close but I want to be able to get closer.
Four countersunk head screws hold the hub on to the plate.
Marking the tool holder post.
Marking down further so the top of the tool will be on centre.
Scribed to end and then across end.
Setting up scribed line square to vice and thus square to table.
The old drink bottle soluble oil squirter.
An extra cross hole is higher than the one with the tool in it so that if the tool is sharpened such that the cutting surface is further down then the cutting edge will still near centre..
Two bigger chunks glued together. I had to plane all the corners and then some just to get it to clear the cross slide.
I got it as close to parallel as I could using chisel.
Tool holder in place to make job parallel.
If you are going to turn wood in your lathe I would suggest thoroughly cleaning up straight after as if there is any sap it will cause staining of machined and ground surfaces of your lathe.
Sorry to those with a slow connection, I should have made two or three pages, may do that some day.
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