Is there such a thing? A "powered hollowing cutter" was mentioned when Jean-Francois GeoGaia was asking about the Kobra hollowing system.
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Powered hollowing cutter?
- Thread starter John Tisdale
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Could it be a translation thing?
It would be the equivalent of running the lathe at a much higher speed without the centrifugal forces and might possibly reduce vibration. On the other hand, the torque load would increase significantly. I would expect that there would also be a lot more dust.
How about a bur on the end of a special Foredom handpiece strapped to a boring bar. Any volunteers?
It would be the equivalent of running the lathe at a much higher speed without the centrifugal forces and might possibly reduce vibration. On the other hand, the torque load would increase significantly. I would expect that there would also be a lot more dust.
How about a bur on the end of a special Foredom handpiece strapped to a boring bar. Any volunteers?
I've been thinking about that for a while. I like turning large solid bowls and hollow forms. At some point, the mass and centrifical force is too large to spin up the blanks. So a powered cutter seems like the solution. I've experimented with a large metal lathe and a router on the Cross slide. Works ok on the outside, not great. Yet....
https://plus.google.com/photos/102238903921963704001/album/6029697319200866097?sview=26
Next idea is an angler grinder with a power carving attachment.
Inside is tougher. My best thought is along the lines of what this guy has done.
http://aspiringwoodworker.com/category/wood-turning/
Drill the center
Mount a router bit on a collet, on a long shaft, with decent HP at about 5000+ rpm.
You need the long extension and stiffness. So that implies larger diameter rods.
Most of this is pretty easy.m but mounting the collet to tool holder on the end would require some custom metal work.
Haven't had time to build on yet. So this is all just theory at the moment.
But any ideas would be appreciated.
Olaf
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awesome lathe....with router bid mostly dust, not curlies
on 5000 rpm.......with a big chunk of wood say about 16 inches wide.....how fast would the cut be at outer rim......might want to use auto-pilot
good luck.......
on 5000 rpm.......with a big chunk of wood say about 16 inches wide.....how fast would the cut be at outer rim......might want to use auto-pilot
good luck.......
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He's talking about the router speed, not the lathe.
thanks......
It's called a lathe! LOL
Can't imagine any benefit to sticking a power anything inside a hollow form.
Can't imagine any benefit to sticking a power anything inside a hollow form.
john lucas
AAW Forum Expert
The problem seems to be the size of the entry hole and removing the swarf created from a powered tool. My friend brad Sells does incredible large carvings using all sorts of powered carving tools. Most of his smaller tools are air powered but are still not that small. When you try to mount them on an extended bar you lose the fine control unless it was attached to something like a captured hollowing rig.
There seems to be two solutions. A massive hollowing rig. Brad purchased one of the robots that has an articulated arm like the ones you see pictured in car assembly plants. He's currently trying to find someone to help him program it. I think his concept is to be able to control it similar to surgeons controlling the DaVince robots. Obviously not cheap and the entry hole is still pretty large
I think a better option is 2 part vessels like Clay Foster teaches. You could then use conventional tools like angle grinders and chain saws to hollow the inside before final assembly.
There seems to be two solutions. A massive hollowing rig. Brad purchased one of the robots that has an articulated arm like the ones you see pictured in car assembly plants. He's currently trying to find someone to help him program it. I think his concept is to be able to control it similar to surgeons controlling the DaVince robots. Obviously not cheap and the entry hole is still pretty large
I think a better option is 2 part vessels like Clay Foster teaches. You could then use conventional tools like angle grinders and chain saws to hollow the inside before final assembly.
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Splitting the form is a method used by Marvin Stoltzfus who invented the ball jig sold by Carter.
Marvin has made hollow full sized basketballs buy hollowing both halves using his jig.
It would be fairly easy to mount something like a Foredom hand piece on jig.
Not sure how big a cutter the Foredom will drive Of course you only get the circular arc cut.
You could mount the Foredom handpiece on a straight hollowing tool and go through a 2" hole
The hand piece could be inside the 2" square tubes used on the big hollowing rigs like Frank Sudal used.
Al
Marvin has made hollow full sized basketballs buy hollowing both halves using his jig.
It would be fairly easy to mount something like a Foredom hand piece on jig.
Not sure how big a cutter the Foredom will drive Of course you only get the circular arc cut.
You could mount the Foredom handpiece on a straight hollowing tool and go through a 2" hole
The hand piece could be inside the 2" square tubes used on the big hollowing rigs like Frank Sudal used.
Al
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the usual question
When I came here about a year ago I said I was new to wood turning. That is true despite the fact I have turned many spindle pieces on a cue lathe using a trim router to turn thirty inch shafts that were a half inch or less for about half their length. This takes no talent or skills at all other than learning set-up and knowing how to design a shaft for substantial end stiffness while maintaining that narrow cross section. The skills required fit pretty well with my past skills as a mechanical designer and metal type machinist. Turning pool cues and components did nothing to prepare me for conventional wood turning.
At some point we have to ask if the power tools, rose engines, and NC programmed devices are really wood turning. For me, rose engines and NC aren't. Some very talented people see it differently.
I think some of the miniature handpieces are small enough that they and a shaft designed to hold them could go into an inch and a quarter hole and shape the vast majority of the inside of a vessel with more standard hollowing tools used near the mouth of the vessel. Pretty sure that somewhere between 3/4" and one inch entrance holes might be possible with some very pricey tooling.
Based on my experience using trim routers to turn very flexible shafts thirty inches long I would say power tools can work and work well inside a vessel. Full robotics can turn the inside and outside of a vessel leaving it as thin as any turner alive can, perhaps thinner. Can turn out one or one million of those pieces. Doesn't seem like why I came to wood turning.
Hu
When I came here about a year ago I said I was new to wood turning. That is true despite the fact I have turned many spindle pieces on a cue lathe using a trim router to turn thirty inch shafts that were a half inch or less for about half their length. This takes no talent or skills at all other than learning set-up and knowing how to design a shaft for substantial end stiffness while maintaining that narrow cross section. The skills required fit pretty well with my past skills as a mechanical designer and metal type machinist. Turning pool cues and components did nothing to prepare me for conventional wood turning.
At some point we have to ask if the power tools, rose engines, and NC programmed devices are really wood turning. For me, rose engines and NC aren't. Some very talented people see it differently.
I think some of the miniature handpieces are small enough that they and a shaft designed to hold them could go into an inch and a quarter hole and shape the vast majority of the inside of a vessel with more standard hollowing tools used near the mouth of the vessel. Pretty sure that somewhere between 3/4" and one inch entrance holes might be possible with some very pricey tooling.
Based on my experience using trim routers to turn very flexible shafts thirty inches long I would say power tools can work and work well inside a vessel. Full robotics can turn the inside and outside of a vessel leaving it as thin as any turner alive can, perhaps thinner. Can turn out one or one million of those pieces. Doesn't seem like why I came to wood turning.
Hu
Hmmm....so are you travelling up to Toronto any time soon? 🙂
In all seriousness, I was/am looking for solutions for when pieces are
1 - wildly off center
2 - too big for normal turning
3 - experimenting with more radical designs or materials.
The technical side is fun to brainstorm and problem solve, hopefully come up with some new ideas which appeals to my tech geek side. Similarly, the robot/CAD idea sounds intriguing and I'd love to see it, but that seems like a factory production and less of an art form. Not that there's anything wrong with that.....
I do agree that its not typical woodturning.
Its not like holding a chisel and the zen I get from real turning.
In regards to doing the inside of a hollow form, I haven't spent much effort on it. My thoughts are that once the outside is reasonably balanced, I can mount it on my regular lathe, spin it up and cut normally. The weight would hopefully be low enough then.
Yes, the 5k rpms I mentioned are for the cutter speed, not bowl rotation.
(Its not a Canadian to English translation thing. 🙂
That lathe now has a 1/2 HP DC motor with a reduction gear which gets the rotation down as low as about 3 rpms depending on the settings. Even at that speed, a deep cut can be more than the router can handle, so the support mechanism is designed to bounce back and out to reduce load on the end mill bit. Works ok, but I just haven't spent much time on it.
Back to my regularly scheduled turning now...
Olaf
handy roughing inside too
I think the power tooling could be very handy roughing inside too. I would think air powered and serious cutter speeds between 25,000 and 100,000 RPM. Air tool and use a hollow center shaft of your hollowing tool as the air passage. The entire shaft or an attachment on the end would need to be out of a very stiff alloy to not add bulk while holding a cutting head. I'm wondering if surplus medical equipment might offer a solution? I'm visualizing something but it might be common or way out in left field, I don't know much about such things.
I don't see a thing wrong with letting machines do the grunt work. I own an NC router which I purchased primarily to rough out inlay pockets for pool cues. The pockets could have machine cut inlays shaped to fit them dropped in but it required hand fitting of both to do what I wanted to do.
There is a magic going on when things are going right with manual work. There is a satisfaction with a technical process going smoothly but it isn't the same. Pretty sure we are on exactly the same page about that when you speak of a zen feeling turning.
I try to let the machines do the same work an apprentice or helper might have once did. I don't get nearly the satisfaction out of letting a machine do the final work.
Hu
I think the power tooling could be very handy roughing inside too. I would think air powered and serious cutter speeds between 25,000 and 100,000 RPM. Air tool and use a hollow center shaft of your hollowing tool as the air passage. The entire shaft or an attachment on the end would need to be out of a very stiff alloy to not add bulk while holding a cutting head. I'm wondering if surplus medical equipment might offer a solution? I'm visualizing something but it might be common or way out in left field, I don't know much about such things.
I don't see a thing wrong with letting machines do the grunt work. I own an NC router which I purchased primarily to rough out inlay pockets for pool cues. The pockets could have machine cut inlays shaped to fit them dropped in but it required hand fitting of both to do what I wanted to do.
There is a magic going on when things are going right with manual work. There is a satisfaction with a technical process going smoothly but it isn't the same. Pretty sure we are on exactly the same page about that when you speak of a zen feeling turning.
I try to let the machines do the same work an apprentice or helper might have once did. I don't get nearly the satisfaction out of letting a machine do the final work.
Hu
I talked with a fellow at the Utah symposium last year (his name escapes me at the moment) who was using a 4-1/2" grinder and cutter mounted to a massive boring bar for reaching deep into huge vessels measured in feet in both directions. He used a pair of Oneway 2436s end to end as his lathe set up. His work was impressive to say the least and certainly not for the faint of heart. I was of the opinion that the bulk of the "wow" factor was in the size alone. The forms were OK but not particularly appealing to me. This was possibly the result of simply finding viable wood in the sizes he required.
Interesting thoughts and different from mine (mostly because I don't have a big compressor - or experience with serious air tools). But I can see how that could work well.
Most of my turning is very wet/green wood - not sure if such high speeds are suitable or would just gum up the cutter. Going to power carving tools seems to imply lower speeds and taking out bigger chunks at a time. But nothing like real curls flying off.
Re: shaft stiffness, I've had opposing thoughts:
1 - reduce random deflection - to get a clean cut
2 - allow deflection - to avoid overloading the cutter if the cut is too deep or you hit a dense spot like a branch.
Ideally, the cutter deflection is controlled and bounced to the center to avoid binding. Then just bounce back for the next turn.
Currently my router sits below the centre axis, deflects down and out when this happens, to prevent binding.
(found that issue early when the router caught, flew off the mount and I dove for the power switch - then changed my shorts).
BTW - thanks for the serious feedback. I've mentioned this before on other boards and usually got the "WTF are you thinking?" I'm not a machinist so not as well versed.
Thanks
Olaf
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I was thinking of the possibilities to hollow multi center forms.
I can turn the outsides with. Multiple sides 2,3,4,5..... Even a near oval
With a powered cutter inside and the Bosxh visualizer I could hollow to multiple sides close enough to succeed in drying the form.
Intriguing idea.
Al
enter Al, bringing the end of brown and round........put it to music
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Hey brown and round can be beautiful.
But there is so much more.
And I must say some of your work has no brown and sometimes just a bit of round.....
🙂
Al
Al, I have a mini reunion (high school chums) this weekend......several classmates are dropping by.......I have 100 pieces +- a couple in living room and dining room.....most are brown , a little less # round but still 70%...........I can see where I started adding a little color and have small % all color......but I still like brown and round, but have started going to an element of chaos......cracks, edge of blank that has been split with maul.......sometimes the edge even looks like something ie.....see the Inner Flit........the form to the left of the sprials near the bottom.......sometimes I am lucky......
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And you can't get any rounder than a ball!
gotta get outside the box sometimes . . .
Olaf,
My old partner and partner in crime held over eighty patents. Sometimes we were thinking so far out the box we couldn't even remember where the box was!
When you are experimenting you just have to go one direction until you succeed or meet a dead end. If you hit a dead end you decide if you have taken things as far as you can go in this area or you just need to back up slightly and take things at a little different angle. If slow and big bites works that is great, if not try something a little different. Right now I'm pondering the possibility of cutting my blanks round with a circular saw angled to carve away the offending wood after rough rounding with a chainsaw. I think it can work much like cutting a nice cove with a table saw and standard blade.
No way to know what will work or work best until you try. Some things are intuitive but I have to admit I am always fascinated by the things that are counter-intuitive. Have fun and when the people on one forum think you are crazy find a new forum. They may be right but then again, we owe a lot in this world to "crazy people" who didn't know any better than to try the impossible.
Hu
Olaf,
My old partner and partner in crime held over eighty patents. Sometimes we were thinking so far out the box we couldn't even remember where the box was!
When you are experimenting you just have to go one direction until you succeed or meet a dead end. If you hit a dead end you decide if you have taken things as far as you can go in this area or you just need to back up slightly and take things at a little different angle. If slow and big bites works that is great, if not try something a little different. Right now I'm pondering the possibility of cutting my blanks round with a circular saw angled to carve away the offending wood after rough rounding with a chainsaw. I think it can work much like cutting a nice cove with a table saw and standard blade.
No way to know what will work or work best until you try. Some things are intuitive but I have to admit I am always fascinated by the things that are counter-intuitive. Have fun and when the people on one forum think you are crazy find a new forum. They may be right but then again, we owe a lot in this world to "crazy people" who didn't know any better than to try the impossible.
Hu
I have pondered the power cutters for the inside of a form, but more for finish cuts than for serious stock removal. I can take as big or bigger cuts with the hand held tools, it is the finicky finish cuts that are the difficult time consuming part for me.
robo hippy
robo hippy
On my "to do" list is to rig up something along the lines of this using an angle grinder and an Arbortech industrial carving wheel.
http://www.azurahorn.com/azurahorn_tradesecrets.html
http://www.azurahorn.com/azurahorn_tradesecrets.html
john lucas
AAW Forum Expert
Hu. In my experience you would be better off mounting an angle grinder on a jig with any one of the various cutters I use 24 grit sandpaper, the Holy Galahad carbide cutter and the LAncelot chainsaw cutter. All work better than a circular saw. How do I know. I had to remove a small stump and I had observed a stump grinder in operation. L thought a circular saw with a course carbide blade would do the job. Well it did but was slow going so I tried my angle grinder with various cutters. Much faster.
Thinking about what we are trying to do which is hollowing I think a spinning cutter on the end of a shaft similar to the ornamental lathe cutters would do the job. It would be kind of slow and require frequent vacuuming of the shavings created. Wouldn't be hard to run a shaft or belt to drive it
Thinking about what we are trying to do which is hollowing I think a spinning cutter on the end of a shaft similar to the ornamental lathe cutters would do the job. It would be kind of slow and require frequent vacuuming of the shavings created. Wouldn't be hard to run a shaft or belt to drive it
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John brings up another major consideration.
When I hollow, I usually spend more time on chip removal than I do on cutting.
I hollow mostly through the face grain and the shavings are long and as wide as a 1/4"
In traditional hollowing the trick is to hollow just up to the point where the shavings form a ball that lifts the tool off the tool rest.
At the wide point of the form this can be just a few seconds.
The dynamics with a power tip and slow vessel rotation will be different.
Rotary cutters will produce short chips in all grain orientations.
Even so generation enough chips to make removing the tool difficult is a situation to avoid.
Al
When I hollow, I usually spend more time on chip removal than I do on cutting.
I hollow mostly through the face grain and the shavings are long and as wide as a 1/4"
In traditional hollowing the trick is to hollow just up to the point where the shavings form a ball that lifts the tool off the tool rest.
At the wide point of the form this can be just a few seconds.
The dynamics with a power tip and slow vessel rotation will be different.
Rotary cutters will produce short chips in all grain orientations.
Even so generation enough chips to make removing the tool difficult is a situation to avoid.
Al
Should be a hell of a lot easier to blow out with a blast of compressed air.
Small chips, likely won't clump. Messy though.
My router experiments yielded a thick layer of dust over the entire shop....
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Getting them out is them is an easy/ time consuming part.
Knowing when to stop with a power tip will be a learning curve.
I hollow mostly with a Jamieson handle and back rest.
I can feel the shavings through the tool so I know when to clean them out.
I'm just thinking running a power cutter inside a vessel would not provide a tactile feedback on chip accumulation.
Al
Hi Guys,
I have followed this thread with interest. As a retired engineer who started his career as a machinist, I have always looked for a mechanical solution in order to reduce the time and effort of bulk removal of the waste wood. This became all the more urgent following an elbow injury 5 years ago.
As has been stated, external bulk removal is a lot easier than internal. I developed a jig which fits the 40mm banjo hole on my home built lathe (40" swing). It is a 9" angle grinder with home made Lancelot type disc (about 7" I think). This sits inside a 5" x 2 1/2" channel section and is fixed by the side handle holes and a nylon yoke around the handle. The channel sits on a crude slide with screw feed of 6". (Will post some pics when I get time). This works well for O/D roughing and the inside of large hemispherical style bowls. As has been stated, bulk removal on the inside of hollow vessels is another story. I am playing with the idea of a drill or angle grinder driven shaft (probably 20mm) with small Lancelot type cutter (home made of course!) mounted on the front. The shaft would be mounted on a pair of bearing blocks fixed to a steel plate. The shaft would slide along its axis and the plate would pivot in the horizontal plane and be mounted in the banjo hole. Yes Olaf, I have also had the WTF is he doing comments.
Kind regards to all,
Tudor
I have followed this thread with interest. As a retired engineer who started his career as a machinist, I have always looked for a mechanical solution in order to reduce the time and effort of bulk removal of the waste wood. This became all the more urgent following an elbow injury 5 years ago.
As has been stated, external bulk removal is a lot easier than internal. I developed a jig which fits the 40mm banjo hole on my home built lathe (40" swing). It is a 9" angle grinder with home made Lancelot type disc (about 7" I think). This sits inside a 5" x 2 1/2" channel section and is fixed by the side handle holes and a nylon yoke around the handle. The channel sits on a crude slide with screw feed of 6". (Will post some pics when I get time). This works well for O/D roughing and the inside of large hemispherical style bowls. As has been stated, bulk removal on the inside of hollow vessels is another story. I am playing with the idea of a drill or angle grinder driven shaft (probably 20mm) with small Lancelot type cutter (home made of course!) mounted on the front. The shaft would be mounted on a pair of bearing blocks fixed to a steel plate. The shaft would slide along its axis and the plate would pivot in the horizontal plane and be mounted in the banjo hole. Yes Olaf, I have also had the WTF is he doing comments.
Kind regards to all,
Tudor
Well, its great to be taken seriously! 🙂
Your outside solution makes total sense to me. Building the mount is the tricky part (for a non-machinist)
if you do get a chance to post pics, I'd be very interested.
Does your proposed solution for the inside look similar to this?
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air might help exhaust saw dust/chips
Working inside with small high speed air cutters the tool would probably use five to ten CFM of air at about 90PSI. Some pretty small die grinders and similar tools pull 15CFM but most home shops don't have that much air. With a little luck the small size of the chips and that much air inside the vessel might force a lot of them out and slow the build-up of waste inside the vessel requiring stopping and cleaning. I don't know and in truth at the moment I'm not chasing this path. Just putting out a little food for thought.
The outside is a different matter. I round with a chainsaw and had hoped to go to a fourteen inch bandsaw. The bandsaw doesn't really work well with green wood so I'm looking at roughing with the chainsaw and then possibly shaping the last inch or two in places with something else. Some of the brush cutters for heavy weedeaters are a chainsaw chain wrapped around a disk, similar to the high dollar disks to go on sidegrinders. I considered that but I'm also considering sliding the headstock to the end of the lathe bed on the lathe I have on order and mounting a circular saw on a short track much as Tudor is using.
I'm not interested in removing huge bulk from the outside, just trying to avoid the issue of the bar binding in the kerf if I used a chainsaw with the comparatively short arc of the bowl or vessel blank. A bow saw bar might be the ticket but I don't think one is available for my little electric chainsaw which I would want to use in the shop.
I would turn the blank by hand already mounted to my headstock so I could regulate feed. A table saw and jig can remove a lot of wood in a hurry. There is video of using one to cut a pretty large thirty-six inch long cove in a piece of wood to make a tray somewhere. Thirty-six inches is just a guess working from memory but it was a similar length. Table saws also function quite nicely as dowel machines with a little adapting and can be made to somewhat profile the dowels. They are used by some to do all of the rough turnings of pool cue shafts, square to round and then taken down in stages with drying time in between.
The circular saw may not work but since I have a circular saw and have the lathe with sliding headstock on order I think I can make some kind of a crude mount to at least test feasibility and see if the idea is worth pursuing. Might not be, all of my knowledge is based on what has been done with table saws. For crude early testing I am only looking at a little time and few if any dollars out of pocket, my favorite kind of experiementing!
Plan B which in some ways I like better would be to make a bow saw bar for a chainsaw. Prefer to not have chain saw bar oil in that area of the shop though. A portable hand bandsaw might could be modified to serve or some kind of a bandsaw made but I don't want to get totally carried away.
I don't feel a strong need for power tooling to remove bulk from the outside once the piece fits on the lathe, just trying to get it fairly round and remove as much catawampus weight as possible before starting to turn. The lathe and a heavy bowl gouge can rough things quick enough to suit me once I'm cutting more wood than air.
Back to thinking about the inside, if somebody wants to go large and fairly slow there are carbide inserts for planers, all kinds of things now. If going through a hole on a big piece, say two inch opening or larger, a burr that took some of these inserts meant for removing wood might be feasible. I don't know if any of the inserts used on hollowing tools now are really meant for wood, I think the dips behind the cutting edges are really chip breakers rather than something meant to work better with wood and it is just a happy coincidence that they work well with wood. Something designed for wood from the jump might work better yet.
Don't know, end of a long day and I'm rambling!
Hu
Working inside with small high speed air cutters the tool would probably use five to ten CFM of air at about 90PSI. Some pretty small die grinders and similar tools pull 15CFM but most home shops don't have that much air. With a little luck the small size of the chips and that much air inside the vessel might force a lot of them out and slow the build-up of waste inside the vessel requiring stopping and cleaning. I don't know and in truth at the moment I'm not chasing this path. Just putting out a little food for thought.
The outside is a different matter. I round with a chainsaw and had hoped to go to a fourteen inch bandsaw. The bandsaw doesn't really work well with green wood so I'm looking at roughing with the chainsaw and then possibly shaping the last inch or two in places with something else. Some of the brush cutters for heavy weedeaters are a chainsaw chain wrapped around a disk, similar to the high dollar disks to go on sidegrinders. I considered that but I'm also considering sliding the headstock to the end of the lathe bed on the lathe I have on order and mounting a circular saw on a short track much as Tudor is using.
I'm not interested in removing huge bulk from the outside, just trying to avoid the issue of the bar binding in the kerf if I used a chainsaw with the comparatively short arc of the bowl or vessel blank. A bow saw bar might be the ticket but I don't think one is available for my little electric chainsaw which I would want to use in the shop.
I would turn the blank by hand already mounted to my headstock so I could regulate feed. A table saw and jig can remove a lot of wood in a hurry. There is video of using one to cut a pretty large thirty-six inch long cove in a piece of wood to make a tray somewhere. Thirty-six inches is just a guess working from memory but it was a similar length. Table saws also function quite nicely as dowel machines with a little adapting and can be made to somewhat profile the dowels. They are used by some to do all of the rough turnings of pool cue shafts, square to round and then taken down in stages with drying time in between.
The circular saw may not work but since I have a circular saw and have the lathe with sliding headstock on order I think I can make some kind of a crude mount to at least test feasibility and see if the idea is worth pursuing. Might not be, all of my knowledge is based on what has been done with table saws. For crude early testing I am only looking at a little time and few if any dollars out of pocket, my favorite kind of experiementing!
Plan B which in some ways I like better would be to make a bow saw bar for a chainsaw. Prefer to not have chain saw bar oil in that area of the shop though. A portable hand bandsaw might could be modified to serve or some kind of a bandsaw made but I don't want to get totally carried away.
I don't feel a strong need for power tooling to remove bulk from the outside once the piece fits on the lathe, just trying to get it fairly round and remove as much catawampus weight as possible before starting to turn. The lathe and a heavy bowl gouge can rough things quick enough to suit me once I'm cutting more wood than air.
Back to thinking about the inside, if somebody wants to go large and fairly slow there are carbide inserts for planers, all kinds of things now. If going through a hole on a big piece, say two inch opening or larger, a burr that took some of these inserts meant for removing wood might be feasible. I don't know if any of the inserts used on hollowing tools now are really meant for wood, I think the dips behind the cutting edges are really chip breakers rather than something meant to work better with wood and it is just a happy coincidence that they work well with wood. Something designed for wood from the jump might work better yet.
Don't know, end of a long day and I'm rambling!
Hu
Something everyone seems to have forgotten: Arbortech makes a 2 inch wheel and a grinder for it. I have a 4 inch arbortech on a grinder and it works great. Ihave used it on blanks on the lathe which are too big to turn, ok will not turn. It makes a very smooth cut and once you get used to the torque it will make a flat smooth cut. With the carbide bits you will only have to rarely (at least I have not) rotate or replace.
would probably work fine for what I want
Gerald,
To cut what I am wanting to that wheel would probably work just fine and I could probably mount it on one of my four and a half inch side grinders one way or another. When I don't take quite enough off with the chainsaw I either grab the electric chainsaw without taking the blank off the lathe or I use the reciprocating saw the same way. I'm just playing around trying to find a way to cut really round blanks and if they are already centered on my lathe headstock so much the better. I suspect this is all largely a nonissue for me once the new lathe gets here, I will be able to turn 20" plus over the ways.
Coming in so I am never cutting end grain it really doesn't take long to do the roughing now, just always searching for a faster way to get to the fun part. I need to improve blank prep before drying too Getting them round before anchorsealing should help with cracks and splits.
We are all over the place with this thread, from tiny inside to huge inside to outside to . . . . . keeps the forum active anyway!
Hu
Gerald,
To cut what I am wanting to that wheel would probably work just fine and I could probably mount it on one of my four and a half inch side grinders one way or another. When I don't take quite enough off with the chainsaw I either grab the electric chainsaw without taking the blank off the lathe or I use the reciprocating saw the same way. I'm just playing around trying to find a way to cut really round blanks and if they are already centered on my lathe headstock so much the better. I suspect this is all largely a nonissue for me once the new lathe gets here, I will be able to turn 20" plus over the ways.
Coming in so I am never cutting end grain it really doesn't take long to do the roughing now, just always searching for a faster way to get to the fun part. I need to improve blank prep before drying too Getting them round before anchorsealing should help with cracks and splits.
We are all over the place with this thread, from tiny inside to huge inside to outside to . . . . . keeps the forum active anyway!
Hu
King Arthur's Tools (Lancelot) also makes a 2-inch instrument with dedicated grinder.
john lucas
AAW Forum Expert
The 2" arbortec fits on a 4" angle grinder so not much savings in size. It is far less grabby and dangerous than the 4" arbortec.
I'm thinking either an air die grinder of a foredoomed handpiece. Attached to a rod. They would easily fit through a 2" hole. Attach a 1/4" piece of pipe to the side for air to blow out shaving as they are created. Use a cutter like one of the course carbide ones and you could probably hog off a fair amount of wood with small enough chips to blow out
I'm thinking either an air die grinder of a foredoomed handpiece. Attached to a rod. They would easily fit through a 2" hole. Attach a 1/4" piece of pipe to the side for air to blow out shaving as they are created. Use a cutter like one of the course carbide ones and you could probably hog off a fair amount of wood with small enough chips to blow out
Here's one I did about 2 months ago. But it started very round and balanced.
Hence traditional turning methods worked well.
I have 5 more that are no where near round, where another solution would be useful.
These are 26-32" and have a bit of weight in them. Spinning them up actually makes the bed of the lathe flex visibly. Yes, I'd love to slow that down.
Olaf
clutch
Olaf,
Obviously I can't see much of your machine in these images so I don't know if any of this is practical but could you put a clutch on your motor or an idler on your belt(s) you could back off and engage with a lever that overcentered and stayed in place once fully engaged to allow softer starts? Are you running a three phase motor? Might find a controller. I have owned trucks with thirty-five ton winches on them and ran some metal equipment that made metal seem more like gelatin. A pretty high pucker factor when any of them did the unexpected. When several inch thick stainless started rippling in front of my cutter it was a sure sign that I was a little ambitious on the feed rate!
Hu
Olaf,
Obviously I can't see much of your machine in these images so I don't know if any of this is practical but could you put a clutch on your motor or an idler on your belt(s) you could back off and engage with a lever that overcentered and stayed in place once fully engaged to allow softer starts? Are you running a three phase motor? Might find a controller. I have owned trucks with thirty-five ton winches on them and ran some metal equipment that made metal seem more like gelatin. A pretty high pucker factor when any of them did the unexpected. When several inch thick stainless started rippling in front of my cutter it was a sure sign that I was a little ambitious on the feed rate!
Hu
Pics of O/D Roughing using angle grinder
Good evening Gentlemen,
Attached (I hope) are the pics of O/D roughing using an angle grinder. Sorry for the delay , I have been away for a few days.
The disc cuts downwards and the spindle runs in reverse. Slowest spindle speed at the moment is about 30/40 RPM I am working on a slow speed attachment using a 60:1 reduction gearbox and small VS motor which will bring speed down to 1 to 5 RPM approx. for better control. A solution for I/D bulk removal is on my to-do list.
Regards, Tudor
Good evening Gentlemen,
Attached (I hope) are the pics of O/D roughing using an angle grinder. Sorry for the delay , I have been away for a few days.
The disc cuts downwards and the spindle runs in reverse. Slowest spindle speed at the moment is about 30/40 RPM I am working on a slow speed attachment using a 60:1 reduction gearbox and small VS motor which will bring speed down to 1 to 5 RPM approx. for better control. A solution for I/D bulk removal is on my to-do list.
Regards, Tudor
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I would like to see a picture that is not quite as close so that I could see a "big picture" view 🙄
A picture that shows most of the lathe I think would be helpful do see where the detailed pictures fit.
Hi Hu
The wood lathe is setup with a 3ph, 3hp motor, VFD Controlled, mated to a 3 spd transmission (good things come in threes...) from a 1960s Jeep.
Odd, I know, but that how I got it and it works. 🙂
On aggressive cuts, I'm stressing out the motor and VFD. So I just picked up a 7.5hp and ordered a 10hp VFD. That should do the trick.
The grinder solution below is interesting and I want to try that on my converted metal lathe.
I dont think it will remove material faster, but thats not what I'm after. Rather a controlled way to handle radical shapes
That one just barely fit. Still needs substantial chainsaw work.
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Nothing at all wrong with using what works. The transmission is one more chunk of machine to turn and has to absorb some horsepower, other than that I don't see any issues. A truck four speed transmission with a granny low gear might have been better for low end torque but I think you will have that issue solved with the new motor and VFD.
Like you, I just want to get to turning wood instead of mostly air without as much intermittent cutting. I'm not working on the scale you are though so I'm thinking the grinder or similar would be adequate for me. I still think the saw might work for my needs, might try a dado blade on it too. With the tool mounted solidly as shown the dangers of the blades or wheels is minimized. The new lathe is supposed to be here the end of next month, then I'll see what I can mount to it to make blanks round before going to hand tools. I start with natural wood also so while mine is smaller, it can be a long ways out of round too. My bandsaw isn't up to the task of cutting the wood and the chainsaw does a pretty crude job. A nice round blank like Tudor shows would sure be nice to start with!
Hu
Per request of Mr Boehme
Hello Bill (and others)
Further to your request. I could not find any wide-angle shots showing O/D roughing in progress, so I have done a mock-up which does not include the work piece, so you will need to use some imagination regarding the size and position of the wood blank.
Pics 1 and 2 show the setup for roughing the O/D and facing at max. dia. which is about 34" swing. Pic 3 shows setup for roughing I/D of large bowl etc. the max. swing is about 14" radius (pivoting about the tool rest hole in the banjo). To be honest, this has not been very successful so far (stalling of cutter disc)
Pic 4 shows my slow speed spindle feed unit (almost complete, waiting for sprocket, chain and belt) this will sit at the outboard end of the headstock and drive via the gold (go-kart) sprocket shown in pic 5 (up till now this has been used as an indexing fixture).
Regards,
Tudor
Hello Bill (and others)
Further to your request. I could not find any wide-angle shots showing O/D roughing in progress, so I have done a mock-up which does not include the work piece, so you will need to use some imagination regarding the size and position of the wood blank.
Pics 1 and 2 show the setup for roughing the O/D and facing at max. dia. which is about 34" swing. Pic 3 shows setup for roughing I/D of large bowl etc. the max. swing is about 14" radius (pivoting about the tool rest hole in the banjo). To be honest, this has not been very successful so far (stalling of cutter disc)
Pic 4 shows my slow speed spindle feed unit (almost complete, waiting for sprocket, chain and belt) this will sit at the outboard end of the headstock and drive via the gold (go-kart) sprocket shown in pic 5 (up till now this has been used as an indexing fixture).
Regards,
Tudor
