I haven’t had a lathe for a long time – nearly 14 years. For the most part, I kept it like this on purpose, since turning is just about as addictive as a drug. Countless hours can be consumed ‘working’ at it, in a trance-like state, neglecting or outright abandoning other duties. The world becomes a whole lot rounder when you have a lathe and everything you make has some turned feature.

My first lathe was homemade, from an old Metabo drill. Two geared speeds (turtle and rabbit) and no reverse, I had it clamped in a saddle made of plywood. The drive spur was a 1/2″ bolt ground to shape and mounted in the chuck. The tail stock live centre was the gearbox and 3/8″ chuck from a dead drill – the chuck had a nail in it sticking out that penetrated the end of the stock. Crude, but effective, I did a LOT of turning on that. One of my first (working) homemade tools. Too bad I don’t have any pictures of it.

My technique was assembled from spare parts as well: I had no training, no proper turning tools. I made do with ordinary woodworking chisels that I ground to the shapes I needed. Along with this ‘make-do’ solution for the equipment, my method was developed to suit, and I became fairly good with this unconventional approach to turning. A combination (I didn’t know this at the time) of shear scraping and scraping, but a bit more aggressive than usually seen. I had no gouge, never have, and when I did use one, I didn’t really like it / couldn’t get used to it.

So, recently I bought a new lathe: a lower cost one, on sale (of course) that I’ll be playing with. Despite my earlier attempts to prove otherwise, a lathe is not the greatest tool to try to build – there are too many specialized parts that would simply take too long to fabricate or be too expensive to buy on their own. Better to get the ready made package and tinker with that.

I did have a look for an older, used lathe before buying this one, but I couldn’t find one suitable that didn’t cost more than the one I bought. Woodworking is popular now and this seems to be reflected in the price of used equipment, lathes in particular.

One of the many things they do to make these lathes (and other tools as well) inexpensive is to power it with an undersized motor, and this lathe is no exception. It claims 1/2 HP, but full load current consumption rating on the motor is 4 amps – this equates (for me) to less than 1/3 HP. I may at some point change the motor for a stronger unit but for now, it seems adequate for what I want to do.

I did make a stand to mount the lathe on, and this will be next weeks featured article. It’s made from pine and is a fairly basic, but very solid design. The lathe came with a metal stand (more of a leg set that bolts to the bed) but I know how these are – they are ok for a month or two but start to get very rickety after that. The fix is to weld the stand together, but that doesn’t solve its other problems. The stand I made has adjustable feet to sit level on any floor and a stout wood stand does a better job of damping vibration than a thin metal frame.

This doesn’t mean I’ll be doing turning projects, just that some aspects of a project might be turned. I’m not into bowls or candle sticks, so I won’t be doing any of that; besides, there are already many guys (much better at it than me) doing that already. I’ll try to do interesting things with it and not use it just for the sake of using it. Should be fun.