Projects

I have in mind a particular project that I want to build. But first, I have to get the necessary tools. The ShopSmith 10E came with a 5/8" saw arbor, a table on the tool carriage with saw splitter and guard, a lathe tool rest, a #2 Morse taper live center (well anyway it came back to life under the influence of lithium grease on the bearings), but no drive center. No Jacobs chuck, no chuck of any kind. No faceplate. A 12" sanding disk, with an ancient coat of that stick adhesive that is tough to remove. Where do you get 12" disks of sandpaper? Had to figure out lots of little things like that, but it is finally all coming together.

There's also an extension table which appears to be the original plywood table (that was soon replaced with an aluminum extension on the 10ER, which makes more sense). But mine still has the wooden one, which is fine for now. A nice feature is the 3/8" holes through the wood and baseplate (1/8" x 1" steel) which match up with the rip fence, so you can attach the rip fence to the extension table on the tailstock.

I didn't get the original 3/8" carriage bolts for the fence, so I bought some. Crappy ones, I basically had to work them in with the stainless wingnuts to get the thread into tolerance. But that worked without shearing any threads, so good so far. And they were cheap so I guess I got what I paid for, huh.

The tool rest for the lathe had never been filed, so there were still rough spots on the bevel from the casting. Makes me think the previous owners weren't much into turning wood with this machine. 15 minutes with a file and the bevel is smooth and ready for duty.

No turning tools. Ouch. Apparently those turners are VERY proud of their tools. Insult to injury, I say.

A big help was finding a tool supplier of very cheap imported tools. I have conversations with fellow customers in this store every time I go there, which is unique for me. Sometimes the conversation turns to the question of, this stuff we're so happy to find at these prices was made in China. So we shrug. I figure, what's good for the goose is good for the gander, so those of us whose jobs have been outsourced had at the very least every right to benefit from the inexpensive tools laid out before us. We didn't build them, but damn if we aren't going to use them to make "American" stuff.

So instead of spending thousands of dollars getting tooled up, I'm spending hundreds. I can live with that.

Grinding. Okay, it's easy to buy a 6" grinding wheel that I could throw onto my saw arbor. But I don't have a cover, and that's just plain crazy thinking. A shattered wheel -- and they do shatter -- is a death knell for an operator (or buddy, or child, or family member...) who is standing in the plane of the grinder's rotation. If you're lucky, you'll come out maimed if there is no guard to catch the shrapnel of an exploding grinding wheel. A tool grinder needs a guard around 270 degrees of its circumference, so you've only got 90 degrees of opening. Unfortunately, that 90 degrees happens to be pointed in your general direction. Your hands and the work will catch stuff before your face does, and the rest of it will go out in the plane of the wheel's rotation -- as it disintegrates, the pieces will take off on a tangent to the circle they were traveling in. Wear safety glasses and use the shield. Use a big rest made out of steel plate that will offer you protection, not something thin that will become another piece of shrapnel. Stand to one side, so that your midsection is out of the plane of the wheel's rotation. And don't shatter the wheel! Heh.

So I bought a bench grinder, for one thing because it was so cheap I probably would have paid about as much for an effective guard for the ShopSmith (!) and besides I will be needing the grinder while turning wood to keep an edge on my turning tools. Not a pleasant idea to be switching setups between grinding and turning, ugh!

The beautiful thing is that my cheap bench grinder and 8-piece carbon steel turning tool set all told cost me less than a single turning tool at my friendly local wood turning supply store. I suppose that people buy tools they figure are well-shaped and -sharpened when they are purchased, and they figure that high speed steel will hold that edge. This is an expensive fantasy, however.

Holding an edge of any kind of steel into a stream of wood fibers will quickly dull that edge. Then what? You've got less cutting potential in your hands than my cheap steel-on-a-stick jobber gives me. Give me a few minutes of turning, then we both have equally dull tools. Now what?

Well, I go to my $30 bench grinder and put a fresh hollow-ground edge on my $1.25 (yep) steel stick and get back to work. If you paid $119.99+tax for the Joseph H. Turner Special Edition Oval Skew but don't know how to put an edge on your steel with a bench grinder, you're a sucker. Sorry. Learn to grind your tools, and always, always, always dress your grinding wheel to a straight surface before touching it with your dull tool or tool blank.

A thought does cross my mind, however. For another $10, did I want to buy the two-year warranty in case the motor goes out? The 1/2 horsepower engine that matches the one on my ShopSmith? Hm, no. If that motor goes out, I think I'll use the shaft and bearings from it and rig up a jackshaft arrangement at the back of the headstock, where the joiner attaches and the pulleys are.

Speaking of jackshafts, dang. I have some training as a machinist, so the tool that is the ShopSmith invites modifications for light metalworking. Mostly milling and drilling, since the toolholding is a major difference between engine lathes for metal turning and wood lathes. The other big difference is the torque delivered by a geared system; it provides the power necessary to make aggressive cuts into cold-rolled steel. Pulleys tend to slip under that kind of demand.

But if you're talking about light milling and drilling you need a slow speed (which increases the torque, conveniently enough), and light cuts into the work. With a 1725 RPM 1/2 horsepower motor, and a 2-3-4" step pulley, one can set the v-belts for speeds of about 825, 1725, or 3300 RPM. Too fast. Drilling a large hole in steel you need to go around 100 RPM with the available torque. So I need a jackshaft (or a variable speed motor, but that's for wimps. Sorry Skip!)

Actually I probably would have opted for the variable speed motor, had I not found the Notes on Pulleys and Belts web page with its brilliant pulley and belt calculator. I'll detail all of that in a separate post, but rest assured this is not a trivial project -- the mathematics are quite involved, and while I've done it all on paper starting from equations in The Machinists Handbook, I consider that a learning experience in which I learned that I never want to do that again, but I'm glad I know how to do it. The Notes on Pulleys and Belts calculator is a life-saver. More on that later...

Did I cover all of my projects yet? Yeah, right.