New lathe recommendations

Steve Turner wrote: (clip) The drum will be 14" in diameter (it's slightly oversized right now) and 6" in depth(clip) ^^^^^^^^^^^ As the former owner of a Jet 1236, I don't feel this lathe is adequate. I would be looking at a lathe with a 20" swing, and a lower speed. In order to mount the drum shell on a Jet 1236, you will have to turn outboard, which will not permit you to have tailstock support. I'm afraid you will have trouble. You may have excess vibration as the drum shell gets thinner. If you get a catch, the whole thing may fly off. And, your concern about RPM at that diameter is well founded.

If you are considering doing outboard turning on a Jet 1236, be very leery of using that weak cast-iron toolrest extender they furnish. People have reported being hurt when that thing breaks under load.

I have a Delta 46-715 which is heavier. I concur with Leo that you would be pushing the limits. I broke my toolrest extender. I have turned some large bowls up to 13" natural edge. I have worn out my bearings and replaced them after about a year of serious turning. It would work, but you would need to have built up skill previously. It would be much easier on a heavier lathe.

A heavier lathe with lower minimum speeds and larger swing has a lot of advantages. If you get an old nag horse she still needs the saddle and eats as much and your kid wants the same equipment, so you really don't save going cheap initially unless you are really not planning to use an item much.

I would recommend a lathe with electronic variable speed for around $2000, like a Delta, Jet or Nova. If you really won't use the lathe much, have someone with a nice big lathe from a local woodturning club do the turning work for you.

Derek

For around $800 you can get a lathe that will handle your needs easily. The Nova 3000 with a 1 HP AC motor is rock solid with a low end speed of 250. I have no problem with unbalanced chainsawed rough blanks of black walnut that weigh 3-4 times your 8 pounds.

But I agree - if this is a one time thing and the only turning you are going to do, it's a lot of money (& time learning) to spend. You would be better off finding someone to do it for you. They would probably let you watch. Especially if you promised not to jibber-jabber while the lathe was running. If you absolutely feel you have to do it, you could probably find someone who would let you use their lathe and show you how to do the turning. Don't forget, the lathe isn't the only expense. You still need a number of tools and turning isn't necessarily intuitively obvious. It's a progressively developed skill.

An alternative you might consider is using hand tools. Coopers used them to make water tight barrels and other containers using stave construction. Inshaves, scorps, drawknives, planes and other hand tools made specifically for coopering are available and would cost vastly less than a lathe.

Hello Steve,

For what you want to do, a Nova 3000 would be a good choice. Currently, new ones are just under $1000 a bit more than the Jet or Delta lathes that are too small to do the job that you want to do. The Nova 3000 swings 16" over the bed and will swing 29" outboard with an outboard tool rest. If you make one 14" drum, you'll likely become hooked and want to make some larger ones. Better go with a lathe that can handle the larger ones too. The 12" Delta and Jet lathes really aren't enough lathe to turn a 14" by 6" turning.

Fred Holder

Whether or not it would work at all is really what I'm trying to figure out. I know a lathe of this size wouldn't be ideal, but this is really a one-shot deal and I don't have any plans to turn oodles of drum shells. I'm pretty confident that my turning skills are good enough to where I won't make a complete mess of things.

The Delta is really the lathe I had my eye on; I saw the Jet the other day at a local shop and was not impressed. I did conclude, however, that the motor seems to have enough power to do the job, perhaps because gearing is used to vary the spindle speed while the motor speed stays constant.

I can't seem to get the real story on the slowest spindle speed for this lathe; my Delta catalog says 600 RPM, but various vendor catalogs claim that it's 500 RPM. I would tend to believe the Delta literature but for the other inaccuracies I've seen in their catalogs. 500 would be better than 600, but

250 would be better still. 14 inches of drum shell spinning by at 10 revolutions every second seems a little scary.

I hear you, but that last thing you said is where I'm at.

Oh I'd dearly love to have Delta's 2HP 76-746, but I just can't justify that kind of money.

Heck, that'd take all the fun out of it for me! :-) Besides, I really could use a good intermediate lathe like the 46-715 for the other things I do, it's just this one project that has me concerned.

Hi Fred,

Larry mentioned the Nova, and it does look nice. The extra HP and the slower speeds are what I wish the intermediate Delta had.

What determines the outboard swing capacity? The available tool rests? I figured any turning as large as a drum would have to be done outboard. Are these outboard tool rests somehow attached to the lathe? I sorta assumed that outboard work like this would require one of those separate tool rest stands. Are these the right thing to use?

You're probably right about getting "hooked"; that's kinda what I'm afraid of! :-)

Steve

Fred Holder wrote:

Any recomendation on what to replace the broken extention with. Mine broke with a catch and I bearly got my foot out of the way before it hit the ground. I still have not replaced it.

Bruce

Oh I'd dearly love to have Delta's 2HP 76-746, but I just can't justify that kind of money.

If it's strictly justification and not because of other more important financial requirements or bank balance size go for it. When I bought my 20" General I was telling my friend while moving it into the shop that it was a lot of money and maybe I'd overdone it for a hobby machine. He said something to the effect that the lathe was real cheap compared to his snowmobile and trailer and I could use it all year round.

Billh

Personally, I'd throw away the pieces and not replace it. If you take a long, hard look at the toolrest/extension arrangement, you have to admit it is an accident waiting for a place to happen. Even if it doesn't break, its certainly not a very sturdy toolrest setup. Both the Delta and Jet are poor designs, in my opinion. Both setups encourage you to exceed the capacities of the lathes they are mounted on.

Barry

Outboard swing is determined by the distance from the spindle to the floor. Of course, you want to limit what you turn to something which your lathe spindle can handle without bending and turn at a speed which does not frighten you.

Also want to consider that a toolrest mounted on the same base as the lathe will give you less heartburn overall than a floor mount if your stand flexes or vibrates, because both will move at the same time.

Drums need not be done outboard, but that comes back to the intersection of your desires and lathe budget, and/or what you can find for used lathes that will help your budget. I have one that will swing 20" inboard which set me back $250, with another $250 or so put into a decent variable speed drive. That took almost a year of cruising the classified ads to find, however, and it's about 120 years old. As you get above a certain easy to move size, the value of getting the lathe removed to the peson who wants to get rid of the lathe reduces the price they ask, IME.

I expect you could get adequate results for your one-off by finding or making compass planes to smooth the surfaces (a convex and concave pair

- fairly easy to cook up in a wood bodied plane).

If you think you'll be making more than one, think hard about getting a lathe that will handle it easily - there are considerable advantages to being inboard, if you can be, especially if you get into drums which are longer than a snare.

Outboard swing is ultimately limited by the floor, though most outboard swing numbers are based on a tool rest mounted to the lathe rather than the floor. Separate tool rest stands can be a bit interesting to use, in practice. Typical low speed on most lathe drive systems is way too high to work on a piece that's anywhere near taking up spindle-to-floor, even if it's nicely balanced. Some extra jackshafts will probably be needed if you get into that size range.