Improvised fly cutter

[mklotz]

Back in days of yore a friend gave me a nice chunk of manzanita root. The color and character was intriguing and I determined to make a nice paper weight for my desk. I wanted a prismoidal, machined shape to contrast with the wildly convoluted fissures and vacancies in the wood.

At the time, I didn't have a mill and needed to machine it on a milling attachment on my lathe. I didn't have a fly cutter with sufficiently wide sweep and I didn't want to do multiple passes as that would leave minute discontinuities that would detract from the desired faceted stone appearance I was trying to achieve.

I decided to convert the faceplate on my lathe into a REALLY BIG FLY CUTTER. To this end, I took a bolt and drilled it through to accept a 3/16" HSS lathe tool bit. A setscrew in the bolt head locks the bit in place. Then, with some washers and a purpose-built nut, this tool was firmly attached using one of the slots on the faceplate.

With the lathe running in backgear at lowest speed, it worked beautifully though I will admit it took for-bloody-ever to carve out the paper weight shape shown in the photo. Not only is manzanita tough, the root, at least this one, is filled with embedded sand that does a great job of grinding HSS. I had to resharpen the bit many times before I was finished. It was worth it, though.