I'm making a new polelathe in the shed. The single bed (polelathe 2000 - as in Mike Abbott's book 'Living Wood') designs that I have used before are light and easy to carry around the shows but as a consequence suffer from the lack of stability especially for turning larger wood.There isn't so much a design for this lathe as a set of ingredients, being the uprights in the shed and the wood to hand.
Having defaulted to a 4 inch spacing between the rails (the upright in the shed being a 4 inch post) these poppets are going to be big and heavy. No danger of these going anywhere in a hurry.To find the wood a suitable oak log was retrieved from the firewood pile. Then a small chainsaw created the basic shape for each of the poppets.
The chainsaw was quick but not particularly accurate amd there are no rightangles to be found. So the poppets are slid into the rails for the fit to be levelled up and then marked up for fitting the wedges.
Still not decided on how to fit the centres and workrest, but I'll fit the wedges first and sort out the metalwork tomorrow.There is a risk inherent in not having decided on the final design yet, but I quite like not knowing how it will turn out. No doubt I am making mistakes, but it's one of the basic ways to learn and I am far too impatient to wait until I've designed the perfect lathe.
1 comment:
I like your design system, possibly because I use it myself. James Krenov, famed cabinetmaker, calls it "composing" a piece. Some people can't move without a complete set of plans, designed in a CAD system, with 0.1 mm tolerances. Bah. Give it a go and see if it works. If not, try something else. This is art, after all, not industry.
Post a Comment