Turning a Wooden Mallet on the Lathe
Ben Light may love his lathe just a little too much, and in this video he shows us how to use it to turn a piece of firewood into the handle for a mallet, and a block of scrap wood into the head.
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Your Comments
And we’re back with our twenty-ninth installment of Your Comments. Here are our favorites from the past week, from Makezine, our Facebook page, and Twitter.
The Concrete Lathe Project
The origin of mechanical precision is a classic chicken-and-egg problem: If you need a precision machine tool to make a precision machine tool, where do precision machine tools come from, in the first place?
Turning A One-Piece Wooden Lamp Shade From a Tree Section
Kiwi master craftsman Sören Berger is a woodturner, teacher, and inventor with 35 years at the lathe. It shows. In this amazing and slightly terrifying video, you’ll see him turn a giant tree trunk section that starts with the bark still on it, inside and out, until it’s perfectly smooth and translucent-thin. Inspiring and wonderful. […]
How-To: Rifle Shell Pen Body
I have before identified Instructables user Mrballeng as a craftsman’s craftsman, and this latest offering only serves to reinforce that opinion. His work is not flashy or complex, but it’s always thought out with exacting detail and does amazing things with everyday materials. Here, he uses a mini-lathe to bore, swage, and align two .30-06 cartridge cases before soldering them together, at the joint, and fitting the guts of a refillable plastic click-pen inside. Cool stuff.
3D-Printed Lathe
If you’d like to try your hand at turning on a lathe, but don’t want to shell out for a machine, how about printing your own EZLathe? Paul writes:
So I’ve built a complete mini lathe system I’m calling the EZLathe… Fully 3D Printable except a small motor, and a couple pieces of cheap electronics. And able to do small wood turning jobs, or small pieces of pretty much anything.
Add a few stepper motors and a controller, and before you know it you’ve got a nifty little cnc lathe.
The Turner’s Cube: Classic machinist’s exercise
This lovely object is more than just an interesting gewgaw: It’s called a “turner’s cube”–so named, I think, because it is a challenge for one who turns on a lathe rather than eponymously–and according to Bob Warfield, “[i]n the old days, novice machinist’s [sic] were handed one and told to work out how to make one of their own.” Bob’s got a cool page describing his efforts to make one manually and then using a CNC mill, with some bonus commentary on this thread by CNC Zone member widgitmaster, who made the cube pictured above, using the jig pictured above, on a big engine lathe. Beautiful!
