Around last August I posted here looking for information about a battered old 70's-era Craftsman wood lathe that a friend and I had just bought as a starter lathe to get us going in woodturning - thanks to everyone for the useful responses I got to my post.
It took a while for me to get around to doing something with it, but within the last couple months I built a bench for it and completely restored the lathe. New ball bearings for the headstock and the motor, and a lot of work on cleaning, painting, and refurbishment. I thought you might like to see some pictures of the final outcome. If so, here's a link to a short Photobucket slide show:
Picture 1:
This shows the lathe sitting on the custom bench I built for it, starting with a simple bench plan from Fine Woodworking ("Build a bench in a weekend"). I modified the dimensions considerably to size it down to suit a lathe rather than a general-purpose woodworking bench. The casters on the left let me lift it from the other end and move it around easily. Next step one of these days is to add a couple drawers underneath for woodturning tools and lathe tooling. When we picked out the wood to use, we tried to use stuff we already had in the shop rather than buying new. So the legs on the front turned out be from a couple pieces of purpleheart, and the back legs are white oak. For the stringers we had a bunch of poplar lying around, and the trim around the top is maple. Two coats of MinWax satin finished it off. After I was done, we agreed that we should have looked a little harder to see if we could have found some more purpleheart for the back legs.
Because this is a starter lathe, the top of the bench is a sacrificial piece of 1/4" tempered hardboard, on top of 1 3/4" of MDF. When we outgrow this lathe we'll just replace the sacrificial piece to hide the holes I drilled to mount this lathe, and drill new ones for the replacement.
Picture 2:
This shows the lathe from the left. If you know what this lathe looks like when it's complete, you can see that the sheet metal that the belt shroud would attach to has been trimmed away. The belt shroud was long gone by the time we got the lathe; no replacement is available from the Craftsman parts site, and I'm not about to buy another one of these just to get a shroud. If I decide I need one I'll make one out of laminated wood, and in the meantime I'm going to avoid wearing long-sleeved sport shirts with the sleeves rolled up and dangling, lest I catch something in the belt.
The motor sits on a piece of plywood, hinged at the front. It's adjusted so that the back edge of the plywood floats in the air about a quarter-inch off the bench. This gives me a reasonably tight belt, while making it easy to change speeds. I just lift the back end of the motor to get the slack I need to move the belt from one pair of pulleys to another, and then let the motor drop back down. If I want to draw more horsepower from the motor, say when I'm running a Forstner bit into the end of a turning, I can just bear down on the motor with my left hand to tighten the belt.
I made a custom scraper from an old file and trued up the pulleys on both the motor and the headstock. That got rid of most of the vibration, and the link belt took care of the rest. It now runs smoothly on all four speeds. Not nickel-on-edge smooth, but smooth enough.
Picture 3:
This just shows the lathe from a different viewpoint. Since this is a starter lathe, and it has an MT1 taper instead of the more common MT2, I've resisted the temptation to tool up since I wouldn't be able to reuse any tooling or recover any of the costs when I sell it. However I was able to find some bargains on drive centers - I found a MT1 Steb center for $4.95! And since I took these pictures I found a 6" tool rest on eBay. Mostly we'll be doing spindle turning and other small stuff on this lathe. As someone on this newsgroup warned me, it's nowhere near rigid enough for any significant bowl turning.
Even after all this, it's not going to be worth much for resale. But at a hundred dollars, say, someone would be getting a pretty good little worker of a starter lathe, with all its problems worked out and in some respects even better than when it was new. I couldn't turn it into a silk purse, though - it's definitely still a sow's ear. But it's our sow's ear, and will be until we outgrow it.
Best regards, Tom