Made a wood lathe

[Ed]

40. Completed tool post
41. Was anxious to test it out so that I could try out the controls, found a rubber tree locally that was cut down and was destined to be burnt off, so got a few logs from it. Even though it was severely out of balance I didn't get any vibration in the lathe up to several hundred RPM, couldn't test faster as the wood was green and it is a very soft wood, even surprisingly so, being out of balance was causing the tailstock live center to gouge out of the end as well as the screws holding the log to the faceplate to pull out. Later on I ended up throwing all the rubber tree logs on the woodpile to get burnt off, I have much better wood now which doesn't give me any trouble.

Still have a few things to do and adjust, the VSD needs to be reprogramed to apply more power for the motor braking so that it will slow down much faster on larger logs as well as boosting the power for the low rev range. My 2 pulley speeds with the VSD give me a 0-1160 and 0-2166 RPM no load range but I will use the lower range mostly due to the size of logs I intend to spin. I should be able to swing a 1m wide log on it but will also have to add a winch to this setup as it was very hard just to put this size of log on it. Still have to build a small locking device at the motor end to lock the spindle shaft when required. Still waiting on another emergency stop switch so that I can switch it off at the tail stock end, that way I can switch it off at either end of the lathe and also at the control panel without having to cross the spinning wood in the middle. Apart from that, it ran better than I expected it to. Currently looking for a small wood lathe chuck to grab the wood at the headstock end better, currently using 10 x 10mm x 40mm coach screws which means there is a fair bit of wastage when I go to cut the bowl off.

Also need to add another 3 phase plug and socket between the control panel and the lathe, so that I can disconnect the control panel from the lathe and then use it to control a 12" 3 phase table saw which is my next project...


Ah!! so many projects and so little time to do them!!


Cheers

Ed.