nova ornamental turner

[Bill Alston]

These are some of my tools. The top one is a commercial router cutter, the other two shop made.



For work on the end. One fixed, one adjustable.



Mounted cutter with safety shield removed for clarity.

 

[Bill Alston]

It’s been suggested that some lathes don’t run fast enough to give a clean cut. Obviously depends on the model of lathe.

Conversely, some routers (if it’s done this way) run a bit too fast. You can get machines with what I believe to be an ideal (adjustable) speed range but they aren’t cheap. I was lucky enough to be able to slow down the lowest speed on my router by adjusting the potentiometer inside. It doesn’t appear to have affected the highest speed which is handy.

If you have, or can get access to a metal lathe the tools are easy enough to make using small pieces of HSS for the cutters.

 

[RichColvin]

I looked at these type of things a couple of years back. I ended up cobbling this together.

View attachment 76212

It’s a small standard X Y Table from eBay for which I machined a custom Router mount. I reduced the speed on the router and I’ve made some of my own cutters using small HSS tool bits.

The overall setup obviously moves the cutter from the lathe headstock to the router and the workpiece to the headstock compared to that in the original post above. The setup worked well in tests but I’ve not got round to using it yet apart from that. These type of things work best with dense timbers which aren’t always easy to source at a good price.

What prompted you to add the plexiglass screen, and what has been your experience with it so far?