A fake machinist's lathe from a woodworking lathe.

[Jeffrey Makiel]

I have a very old Delta benchtop wood lathe. I want to do some higher precision work and often wondered why nobody offers a compound adapter to help achieve a higher degree of precision for woodworking lathes like they have on metal lathes.

So, after sorting through a bunch of X-Y milling tables on Amazon, Ebay, Grizzly, MicroMark, etc., I bought stout X-Y table from eBay for $75 delivered. It seemed that none of the offerings for under $180 had glowing reviews.

The X-Y table is all cast iron with machined ways with gib adjustment, and acme lead screws with thrust bearings. It has a small 3" x 3.1" movement to which I attached a 'quick change tool holder' for about $30. The tool holder will hold cutting tools from 1/4"x1/4" to 3/8"x3/8" square, a 1/2" parting tool and 3/8" dia. boring tool.

The X-Y table needed a lot of love and care to make it work OK. Not great, but OK. There's actually a Youtube video of someone reworking their new table! However, it's strong, very heavy, stable and no slop in the X or Y movement. It manipulates the cutting tools around with the accuracy I need. However, I'm not so inclined to recommend it since there were issues from new.

The quick change tool holder works well. It's a Jinwen. It's good for wood and plastic/phenolic. I assume it will work OK with aluminum (which is the goal) using a light touch. I wouldn't use it for metal as it's made from aluminum (vs. steel like 'real' ones), but the machining is very good. So far, I'd recommend it with the caveat that you limit your work to soft materials.

Here are some pics of collars I made from HDPE for another project as shown in the last pic below. They were turned to 1.488" dia. to fit a 1.490" dia internal bearing. They also sport a 1/2 degree internal taper.

Not bad for my first try at being a fake machinist.
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[Alex Zeller]

Nice. Last year I made a wooden and steel cart (kind of like what a street vendor would use) for flowers for my wife. I picked up some antique cast iron wheels from a sickle bar mower. The horse would pull the mower and the wheels would drive a differential that would power the cutting action. Because of this they didn't have any provision for bearings. The diameter of the hole was slightly larger than 1 7/16". It took for ever to find something I could use as a bearing/ reducing bushing without paying a machine shop lots of money to make me something. The cart doesn't move very far so I was able to use PVC but it probably was the hardest part. With what you came up with I could have easily made what I needed in minutes.

[Perry Hilbert Jr]

Walker turner and I believe Delta both sold compound cross slides for their heavier duty wood lathes. I think it was the larger Walker turner that was touted as both a heavy duty wood lathe ad light duty metal lathe. I recently saw a cross slide for a delta wood lathe for sale on Craigs list. But they wanted almost $300 for it.