Arts and Crafts IX: The Need for Wood

I like woodworking. I like being able to turn wood into something nice.

 

Still, I don’t like buying wood. Especially exotic wood—though I’m not above working with a good piece of paduak or purpleheart. And I have really enjoyed working with bloodwood. American hardwoods like walnut or ash are also fun.

 

But every day I see trees—really beautiful hardwoods—cut down to make subdivisions of McMansions. Whenever I can, I try to snag as much wood as I can—or think I can—use.

 

However, I don’t have a saw mill and turning an off-center log on my lathe rotating at ten times a second is just scary. I have a band saw but it’s not really up to the task.

Some years ago my old Delta gave up the ghost. That is, the pulleys of the Reeves drive broke. A Reeves drive is one implementation of what is called a continuously variable transmission. It consists of two pulleys made of intersecting cones. (See the link above.) Pulleys trade speed for power. A little pulley rotating quickly that turns a larger pulley means the larger pulley is turning slower but with greater torque. A big pulley rotating slowly turning a smaller pulley more quickly has less torque but runs faster. The Reeves drive allows selecting this with a simple lever.

 

But the Delta pulleys were of inferior quality. First, the one turning the spindle (which turns the wood) broke but I found a replacement. Then the motor pulley broke and no replacement was available. Delta hasn’t made lathes for some time. (That was then. A new search has suggested replacements might be more plentiful. Oh, well.) I replaced the lathe but the old Delta just hung around the shop. I don’t like throwing things away. It’s a waste.

 

Finally, I hit on an idea. I’d rip out the pulleys entirely and replace the spindle pulley with the biggest one I could find and replace the motor pulley with the smallest one I could find. I calculated this would get me as slow as five rotations/second—still not great but vastly better than ten. The Delta would then be used as just making blanks from logs. I could use all that wood I’d been accumulating.

 

I did that and it worked. But now I had a dilemma. 

 

Over the years, I’ve been trying to expand my shop into the left bay of the garage. And this lathe just wouldn’t fit—at least, it wouldn’t fit and leave me space to work with it. But, I thought, wait a minute. I could just take the lathe out of the garage and do the turning outside. Since I planned this to be a seasonal effort, that would work. 

 

But that meant the lathe had to be mobile. Wood lathes are very heavy. Mobility was not in their repertoire. 

 

I came up with the idea of putting it on wheels. This was a good idea but had a significant flaw. I’d put the Delta back on its cast iron stand. The stand’s legs were at a significant angle. The wheels wouldn’t fit.

 

I tried to make a wooden insert—and broke a chop saw and nearly my finger in the process. That wasn’t going to work. 

 

My friend Eric suggested I pour the insert into a mold. I resolved that was what I would do.

 

I built a set of four boxes for each of the legs.

 

 

Then, I filled them with concrete and attached a lever arm wheel assembly.

 

 

I now had a lathe that I could move easily.

 

 

Now, I could turn the raw wood (seen above) into product.

 

 

 

But, where am I going to put all this brand new wood? Uh oh. Is another project in the offing?

 

Also, Orange Voldamort is going to restart nuclear testing. Antarctica is starting to look like Greenland. OV didn’t create the situation. He is just making things much, much worse. And, of course, the East Wing is gone, as the Brain Caterpillar goes from destroying metaphorical institutions to actual physical ones.