I've been 'accentuating the negative and eeeliminating the positive' here lately. Actually, I'm having a ball with my son's (oh sure) new VS Jet mini. What a great little machine. No wonder so many loyal owners praise it. By taking the banjo and tailstock off, even this 170 lb. weakling can carry it. It's smooth, quiet and has adequate power. The tail spindle is hollow, ejects centers and locks down nicely. Everything performs to specifications. I wish it could be reversed and its speed lowered to zero. Maybe someone will tell me how to make it do that?
In return I'll mention a couple of dodges that helped me the other day. Doubtless not original, but they might help someone sometime. While making small salad bowls held on the Jet with expanding jaws and turned without reversing, the chuck got in the way and made the space between the dovetail and the inside bottom of the bowl hard to measure. I made the dovetails large so the chuck jaws were spread apart enough for a figure 8 'caliper' with one thin straight leg to fit between them and abut the dovetail. I cobbled it from sheet metal and it is ugly, but it kept me from making funnels, To help determine the depth of the inside bottom of a bowl held on a jam chuck, I used a length of 3/8" steel rod inside the head spindle. I filed a small notch to reference the space between the jam chuck and the outboard handwheel. By seating the rod's tip against the bowl bottom while sliding a collar away from the notch, I could figure out where the tip was inside the bowl.
I'm becoming cognitively deprived and I may have gone around Robin Hood's barn instead of taking much easier ways to make these two measurements. If so, ? Arch
Fortiter,