A Roller Filing Rest. AKA, the Poor Man's Milling Machine

[Mark Presling]

Many years ago, the only machine tools I owned were a lathe and a drill press. I was building a model steam locomotive at the time and it was sometimes necessary to make accurate flats, squares and hex's on cylindrical bar stock. The simple solution turned out to be a roller filing rest used in conjunction with an indexing attachment fixed to the spindle of the lathe. This post is about the roller filing rest and how it is used on the lathe.
The tool I made is fairly basic with soft steel rollers running on hardened steel pins but more elaborate versions use brass or bronze bushes and case hardened or through hardened rollers. The advantage of the soft rollers is that they don't tend to damage your file if one or both seize up. There is a link in the video for a set of free plans to make a similar tool.