• It's time to cast your vote in the April 2025 Turning Challenge. (click here for details)
  • Congratulations to Steve Bonny for "A Book Holds What Time Lets Go" being selected as Turning of the Week for 28 April, 2025 (click here for details)
  • Welcome new registering member. Your username must be your real First and Last name (for example: John Doe). "Screen names" and "handles" are not allowed and your registration will be deleted if you don't use your real name. Also, do not use all caps nor all lower case.

Metal Spinning

M

Mike Johnson

Joined
Jul 26, 2016
Messages
2,326
Likes
1,112
Location
Nebraska
Anyone on the site using their wood lathe for spinning metal? I have several jobs coming up where I need to spin some metal parts. Looking for any resources that may be available tools and materials etc.
 
Well I got into it but then got married and moved and had to spend almost a year getting the shop back up and running. So what I'm saying is it's almost like starting new. I will try to answer questions. There are two guys who do it a lot and I'll try to remember their names. Probably hit me about 2am when I wake up in the middle of the night. I took a class with David Marks and had a ball. I apparently had a good touch and took to it pretty fast. About half the class or more wrinkled up their first few vessels. by the end of the weekend we all were doing pretty well. I made my own tools. I don't really know where to buy them right now. Penn State Ind. was selling tools and materials for a while but they quit. Oneway sells a metal spinning tool rest. I built my own for that also. I will have to do some more research to find other metal spinning resources. There is an excellent DVD listed online. I"ve never purchased it but heard a lot of good things.
there are also some pretty good youtube videos although many of them are too professional for most of us.
 
John,

Thank You for your reply....I am surprised there are not more wood turners involved in the metal
spinning craft, the mandrels used for the spun items are usually wood turned forms. Making the
tools will be my next project, I have several options there to work with.
 
Mike, can you give us an idea of what you want to spin? Size, material, etc, etc.

In general, you'll want annealed material which is sometimes not so easy to find in small quantities. Possibly, a method of annealing if working with material that tends to work harden. Copper alloys will need a pickling solution to remove heat scale after annealing.

Tools,... you can make those yourself. The lathe will need a tool rest with pivot pin holes, again a DIY item.

I would say becoming proficient at metal spinning is a bit more challenging than wood turning.
 
Doug,

One of the items I will be forming will be metal spheres in various sizes. 4" thru 12" diameters
Intend to use aluminum and copper metal mostly. I located some 4 foot steel pry bars that
can easily be worked into spinning tools. One end is tapered to a point the opposite end has a
curved flat duck bill. A little work with a grinder and should have a usable tool. I have some carbide
cutting tools for my metal lathe that I can braze or weld onto another steel bar for a trimming tool.
 
Mike - what is your location? If you live near Dallas TX, I will loan you my tool rest and long forming tool. I took a class several years ago, bought the tools from the instructor and have never gotten around to playing with them.
 
Mike Johnson said:
Doug,

One of the items I will be forming will be metal spheres in various sizes. 4" thru 12" diameters
Intend to use aluminum and copper metal mostly. I located some 4 foot steel pry bars that
can easily be worked into spinning tools. One end is tapered to a point the opposite end has a
curved flat duck bill. A little work with a grinder and should have a usable tool. I have some carbide
cutting tools for my metal lathe that I can braze or weld onto another steel bar for a trimming tool.
Click to expand...

Mike, not to spoil all your fun, but.........

http://www.necopperworks.com/copperballs.html

A 4" ball is $29. Buying the material at onlinemetals.com a 12" x 12" piece of dead soft .040" copper is $24. So about $12 in materials per 4" ball, using two 6 x 6" pieces.
 
Doug,

I have a supply of copper and aluminum sheet metal for this project already. The spheres need to be made to a specific diameter to fit the intended application. I am sure I could have someone make them but I would need to pay for the mandrel forms for each specific size which I intend to make myself. Once I get all of my mandrels made I might look at jobbing it out, but the market I work in has a limited volume of business. I have a few other items besides the spheres that I also want to spin. I also have a couple of Tesla coils that I would like to finish one of these years with a custom made toroid.

Paul,

Most of the retail tools sold for spinning are somewhat undersized for the abuse these tools take when spinning the bigger items and harder metals. I already have a metal spinning tool rest for my lathe I intend to use for my metal spinning.

John,

I have access to a full equipped metal fabrication and tool shop at my day job. I can heat treat and weld just about any kind of metal there. I can turn some metal rollers on my metal lathe for the more complex beading and roller tools and set them up on a tool shaft and handle. The tools I am making will be about 4 foot long with the handles when done.
 
Glad to see they are back in the spinning business. Need to figure out how to incorporate it into turning..........without SWMBO finding out.
12x12 copper at $24? To make how many items? Expensive, IMHO. May have to skip this.
 
Mike Johnson said:
Some spinners use copper sheeting from the lumber yards that are used for gutter and flashing applications.
Click to expand...

You have to be very aware of thickness when you compare prices and buy. Online's price I mentioned for dead soft C110 copper was .040" thick (the thinnest they sell in 0 temper). Roofers copper from Online Metals in .043" thickness is even more expensive for the 12" square.

A friend who works exclusively in copper tells me Online's prices are about 3 times what he pays in volume purchases. Places like Online are the only place to buy small quantities though.

I believe typical roofers copper at lumberyards would be .021" thick, know as 16 oz. Probably half hard so might need annealing prior to spinning and mighty be too thin (depending on the spinner's experience of course).

Copper is expensive wherever you buy.
 
Mike Johnson said:
Anyone on the site using their wood lathe for spinning metal? I have several jobs coming up where I need to spin some metal parts. Looking for any resources that may be available tools and materials etc.
Click to expand...

I’ve done a bit of metal spinning, just a few pieces, and made my own spinning tools and toolrest, used copper as it is easy to soften and I had/have some copper sheeting, so never had to buy any.

The sheets I used came from an pressure-less water heater that had started to leak at the seams, for the rim fold over I just two tools at the same times to hold and raise the edge and then roll back.

A skew works just fine for trimming the edge.

If you can turn the forms from hard wood the rest isn’t that hard to do, even if you have to anneal the metal more than once to get there.

These are nothing special, just some of what I made,
Copper ball ornament.jpg Copper ball ornamend side.jpg Honey Locust Quartz and copper.jpg Copper and quartz candleholder in Honey Locust.jpg Apple with hammered copperlid.jpg Rough hammered copper lid on Apple bowl.jpg
 
Nice work Leo!
I found a set of used tools, just waiting for them to show up this week so I can clean them
up and start practicing on some smaller pieces.
 
Bill Boehme said:
Very nice. Did you also turn the granite? :D
Click to expand...

Thanks Bill, the quartz core I picked up at an abandoned hard rock mining place in the Ontario wildernis, where before Mica and Graphite was mined, that piece and several more lengths took a hike with me on the ATV.

I had to smooth and polish it, then applied CA on it and polished that.
 
there is a huge metal spinning company in our town and I've heard of them giving tours to the engineering class at Tenn. Tech University where I worked but was never able to wangle a way in. The guy who is the president does what people call air spinning where they don't use a form. I was dying to see that done.
 
Here's a picture showing showing a spinning operation. The tool has a lever arm to give mechanical advantage on difficult material.

If you look closely you can see why the very best spinners have three arms. Two arms to handle the lever tool, plus the third one for the back up lever.




spinning-tool.JPG
 
Here's a plan for the roller spinning tool shown in my previous post. This one shows a fairly large roller, that can be scaled down in diameter to suit your needs though. And the nose radius can likewise be made to suit.

spinning-tool-roller.JPG
 
The professional spinner that i met one time used an Oak stick as a back up especially on larger platters. I set up a demo for club. He was turning the lower half of the Kerosene well on an Aladan's kerosene lamp. It literally took him about 30 seconds or less. After he finished he said does anyone want to see it again. We said yes because we didn't see it the first time. The scary part was he chained himself to the lathe and used his whole body to swing the tool. These were about 12" discs when he started and ended up being about an 8" bowl with a lip. He would turn two of these and put them together by spinning epoxy into the joint. That was the reservoir for the kerosene for those lamps.
 
Many of the commercial spinning operations have migrated to using a high tech polymer
roller wheel for the metal spinning process. They are expensive but last a long time when
doing production spinning. I can turn metal wheels on my lathe but just might try a roller blade
wheel to see how long it would last turn some of the smaller metal pieces. I have a few of these
left over from a steady rest project.
 
Hello all!

I'm a metalsmith whose done a fair amount of lathe work as well (both woodturning and metal spinning) over the past twenty years. I've done several demonstrations and get regular emails asking about metal spinning. I've decided to start my own YouTube channel to help others learn metal spinning:
https://www.youtube.com/c/JamesThurman Feel free to Subscribe (for free)--I'm planning to post a new video every Monday. I'm also happy to take requests for new videos if anyone has a particular problem or is curious about a specific technique. I'm happy to help out and I look forward to hearing from you!
 
William Moore does spinning...I think he's in the directory.

Check your local scrap yard for copper roofing. It won't be pristine, but the price is right. If you're ever in the Asheville, NC area, check out Biltmore Scrap Metals...great scrap yard which encourages artists to come poke around.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top