My friend Jim has been busy with his new mini lathe making pens and other turnings. His enthusiasm became infectious. It did remind me that I had a new shop without a lathe! I asked Jim to show me his lathe and help me to turn a pen. I promised I wouldn’t buy a lathe until we got together. Saturday morning we spent some time together, and this was the result.
The metal parts are from a kit. The walnut turning is my work. With the cool system tools Jim had, it is pretty straight forward to produce an awesome product.
True to my word I did not buy a lathe until I played with Jim’s Rikon mini-lathe. The Rikon is really nice for small work. It is super accurate and exellently machined. But I had in mind something more “industrial” for the shop, particularly something that would fit in with my old Delta/Rockwell collection of tools. By my good fortune, an excellent old Rockwell 46-450 lathe was available on KSL.com classifieds. The lathe was made in 1974, and has seen very little use. Paid about a dollar a pound!
Very nice work! I was excited to see the flickr stream show up for these two fine items.
When I was little, there was a man near where I lived who had converted the steam engine from a train locomotive into a lathe–don’t ask me how he did it, I just know he did. He turned out cane back and cane bottom chairs, rockers, bar-stools, foot stools, porch swings and the like. Mama bought a rocking chair for $25 and foot stools for $5 each. It was incredible what his prices were and what those items are worth now. She paid three times the original cost of the chair to have it recained a few years ago. The Smithsonian had a traveling exhibit and asked Mr Bump to demonstrate how he made his furniture. He had a foot-powered lathe he took with him to these demos. People would come by and surreptitiously pick up the curls of wood he shaved off as if they were stealing something of great value. His was the only exhibit that they didn’t have to clean up after. His son now has the family place but doesn’t make furniture any more–he’s only 88 or so. But your pictures just brought back a bit of nostalgia.