Steady rest

[Christophe Mineau]

In the precedent post, I showed my long boring D bits in use together whith a steady rest. Here it is .

I have two sizes of steady rest, here is the bigger, made out of metal. The other, which I will show another time, has a wooden frame.



It is made with corner profiles for the two mobile bars, and with square section profiles for the base and top bars. It is hold together with two big 14 or 16? mm (I don't remember) threaded rods on each side.
The wheels are roler blade wheels, bolted to the corner profiles.
The frame is bolted to the bed of the lathe thanks to the two wooden pieces you can see at the bottom.


First of all, you need to true up the wood piece using the live center. You need to turn a neat track for the wheels.



Then you want to make the wheels touch the wood. So you tighten up or down the bolts in order to get an even pressure on the wood in all directions. The wheels are made out of soft rubber, so it's not easy to keep a good centering. You need to chek that you keep the center using the live center point as a reference.




And here we go ! you can work at the end of the piece, even if it's quite long.




If I had to redo it, I would try to find wheels with harder tires.

I forgot to say that the bar with the two wheels has several holes in order to space more or less the wheels, depending on the workpiece diameter.