Foot-powered Lathe Is A Tour De Force Of Joinery Techniques

April 26, 2013 by 48 Comments

foot-powered-lathe

Meet [Quetico Chris]. He’s a master woodworker who likes to find his own alternatives to using power tools. Most recently, he was inspired by a fly-wheel from an old factory. He used it to build this foot powered wood lathe.

It works something like a foot powered sewing machine. There’s a lever for your foot which converts the downward force from your foot into a rotating force which drives the work piece. The mechanics of the lathe are pretty common, but we think the build techniques he uses are anything but. The video after the break shows each step [Chris] went through when crafting the human-power tool. His approach was to use wood as often as possible which includes foregoing modern fasteners for older joinery. He uses mortise and tenon, wood pinning, doweling, and a lot of puzzle-like tricks to get the job done.

We lack the skill and tools to replicate this kind of craftsmanship. We’re going to stick to letting a laser cutter form our wood connections.

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Turning A 1942 Lathe Into A Functional Piece Of Art

May 28, 2012 by 28 Comments

A couple of years ago, [macona] picked up a 1943 Monarch 10EE lathe. This monstrous machine is not only an amazing piece of engineering but an awesome work of art; not only can this lathe manufacture parts with exacting precision, it’s also a wonderful piece of machine age design.

The Monarch 10EE lathe was extremely high-tech for its time, and the War Dept Detroit Ordinance District tag on the cooling pump bears this machines lineage: this lathe was most likely used to make very precise military equipment such as the Norden bombsight.

After 60 years of faithful service, [macona]’s lathe picked up several coats of paint in different colors and generally fell into a state of disrepair. [macona] spent a great deal of time overhauling this lathe by replacing a bent feed rod, troubleshooting the motor problems, and eventually replacing the whole motor with a modern AC brushless servo. You can check out the improvement the AC servo made in a video after the break.

Of course no post about a rebuilt lathe would be complete without a few beauty shots. We’re extremely thankful for [macona] for not only restoring this machine, but also for sharing it with us. Thanks to [macona]’s restoration, this machine will hopefully be around for another 60 years.

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3d Printing A Mini Lathe

May 21, 2012 by 21 Comments

While browsing on one of our regularly visited sites, RobotsDreams, we found this interesting little video. Here, [Sublime] is showing off his 3d printed mini lathe. In the video he mentions that all the files are available for download so you could make one for yourself, but there were unfortunately no links. A quick bit of googling and we found some more information.  We found the project on Thiniverse, though reading through the comments it seems that [Sublime] no longer uses Thingiverse. You can now find the files on his GitHub account to make your own.

The design seems very solid and looks like it could handle some basic jobs. As [Sublime] points out in the video below, you already know what parts are going to wear out fast and can simply print a few extras to have on hand.  While that may seem somewhat wasteful, he also points out that he’s using PLA which is compostable and much easier to recycle.

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They May Be For Developing Countries, But We Want A Concrete Lathe

September 27, 2011 by 59 Comments

At the 2009 Ghana Maker Faire, [Pat Delany] met a young carpentry student that saved for three months to buy a cheap Chinese wood plane. He was confounded by this distribution of resources, so [Pat] created the Concrete Lathe project that aims to get useful machine tools out to where they’re needed most.

The idea for concrete machine tools came out of the US involvement in World War I. America had been staunchly isolationist before committing to the war, and production of arms did not match the needed output. A man named L.I. Yeomans came up with the idea of building concrete lathes to produce artillery shells for the war effort.

Of course, the concrete lathe project is a bit more peaceful in its intentions. The concrete lathe is meant to be a cheap machine tool for developing nations. Both the concrete lathe and the Multimachine are meant to be built cheaply using scrap materials, reduce training time for machinists, and create other machine tools in a Reprap-like biological distribution.

There’s a ton of documentation on the concrete lathe wiki like the bed instructions torn from the pages of Ikea instructions, and the thread follower. While they’re still a lot of work and testing to be done, giving some manufacturing capability to those who need it most is a pretty noble cause.

Thanks [Rob] for sending this one in.

Improvised Metal Lathe

September 25, 2011 by 16 Comments

[McKGyver] needed a few parts manufactured. Instead of going the normal route – finding friends with machine tools or paying a machine shop, he improvised a rudimentary metal lathe.

As much as we love 3D printers, they’re not the be-all, end-all solution for everything. Sometimes, you need to get a little dirty and do it the old-fashioned way. [McKGyver] needed a way to produce aluminum shaft couplers to join stepper motors to lead screws. A 1940s grinding wheel was used for the headstock. Since [McKGyver] only needed couplers of one size, he made a jig out of wood to attach the aluminum blanks to the spindle. A drill and a focuser from a photographic enlarger makes up the tailstock of the improvised lathe. The use of a camera focuser is pretty clever. Unless the equipment has been damaged, it’s guaranteed to move in a straight line. A small laser was used to align the drill.

The finished couplers were concentric to 0.005″. A ‘passable precision’ for his application, and a clever build that doesn’t involve moving a thousand pound South Bend lathe.

Lathe Modification

February 18, 2010 by 21 Comments

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maB28gXoZV4]

The folks over at NerdKits got a shiny new Smithy 1220xl lathe/ mill. They found, however that adjusting the Z axis wasn’t as accurate as they desired. They decided to resolve this by installing a digital caliper and an LCD interface to display the adjustments. The writeup is quite detailed and the results seem to work great.