Home made tools.

[Bodrighy]

Having been reading Dean's thread with interest and being a cheapskate I am always on the lookout for new ways of doing things on the cheap and was wondering what, if any, tools we have made for ourselves. I've been searching the net and apart from the 2 main sites for this sort of thing (Around the woods & Laymar crafts) there seems to be little info out there. I am talking about tools, not jigs etc. Personally I have made a couple of tools for miniature work but little else. It would be interesting to hear / see what others have made

Pete

 

[John. B]

Hello Pete,

I think you will find that most turners have made several tools for use on the lathe for particular jobs.
I have made several tools for parting, scraping, etc. by buying a length of high speed steel and grinding it to the shape I want then making a handle for it.
I'm at present making a new tool rest (Want one longer. fortunately I have a small engineering lathe).

John. B

 

[duncanh]

I've made a few...

extra long articulations to go on the end of my Munro hollower - basically just short lengths of 1/2" steel bar with threaded holes to join to the main bar and attach cutting edges. One takes the small cutter holder from the Sorby multi tip scraper and one takes a tear drop scraper/original Munro cutter.

a 1m long hand held hollowing bar from 3/4" steel bar which takes the above extensions

a swappable three point tool/skew

The crudely ground flat is for the screw to lock onto and keeps the bar from rotating
The brass ferrule started live as a plumbing fitting

Duncan

 

[Finial]

Some quite useful small gouges in carbon steel. You take a steel rod (such as a large old screwdriver), drill down into the end an inch or two, it doesn't have to be deep. You may need to soften it first. Grind away half the hole so you have a gouge shape, harden and temper. You can make very small gouges for detail work that you cannot buy, and by using thicker rod and leaving most of it in the round, they are stiff enough to use more than about 3mm over the rest, unlike some of the commercial ones.

Some useful form scrapers in HSS, including a bead cutter I use a lot on mdf.

Some tool bit holders for hollowing.

Slave chucks with various inserts such as threaded rod or small pins to drive in blind holes.

screw chucks including one on a morse taper with draw bar.

The most used of my home-mades is a ball cutting device, but that incorporates a slide of an engineering lathe so may not count!

 

[John. B]

Finial.
Show us a pic of your ball cutting device, and yes of course it counts.

 

[johnny.t.]

I've made myself a large oland tool with a 1/4 HSS cutter, a side scraper from steel rod taken from an old bit of potato harvester and a chatter tool. No pics though as their made from hideously rusty,bent bar!! but they do work well and surely thats all that really counts

JT

 

[Finial]

OK this is the ball contraption, it only does hemispheres but i can set the depth of cut with the two locknuts and then crank out identical ones in about a minute or so each depending on the size. Then i glue them together. The lever operates a rack and pinion to advance the tool. It can take various tools but I usually use this carbide tip now, and generally make the balls in mdf. Larger ones go on a larger screwchuck, i just have to make sure the pivot point is in the same plane as the chuck surface.

Never tried to upload photos before, what a sweat, if they come out i shall a) be surprised
b) put up one or two of the little gouges i mentioned.

 

[Finial]

Maybe these work better

 

[Finial]

That's better, now to make them smaller...

Here are the small gouges, a carbide bit holder i use for mdf and a chip deflector made out of thin steel with a couple of small NIB magnets attached so it clips on and off any tool easily. also a thin parting tool made of a hacksaw blade set in a wooden handle and held with rivets. And a solid aluminium finial I hand turned recently.

 

[dickm]

Nice device for ball turning. Presumably you could also move it down the bed, which would allow you to turn near whole balls by pivoting it further to the left along the lathe axis, if you see what I mean?

Not really home made tools, but I've re-threaded various chucks to match changing lathes; from Coronet to Tyme to Mystro. But have just messed up, for the second time, an adaptor to fit Bonham chuck to the Mystro :evil: And now the motor on the Super 7 is making nasty noises when in reverse

 

[Finial]

I think the problem with all this type of quadrant device for full circles is that the headstock and tailstock get in the way. If I was making a wooden ball I could move the pivot point towards the tailstock end and make most of the circle then finish the fixing points using a different method. But this is normally for mdf and there is no grain to match, I just glue the halves. Also scraping is not so good with real wood.