Freehand metal turning

[Ttrees]

Hello folks
After reading a few recent posts here, it seems that this place looks jolly too
I was thinking about posting this some time ago, but never dared rile up the metal forum dwellers.
To top this off, I was thinking of rigging something like this up on my wood lathe.
The mouse started spinning the cog when I saw this...

Enough talkin from me, here is the Turnado video.
What ya'll think?... looks easy to make

[youtube]Xs8XZ8X1I-g[/youtube]

Tom

 

[rxh]

Interesting - please let us know how you get on. I have done freehand metal turning using a tool rest, rather like using a scraper for wood turning. If you vary the angle of presentation of the tool a "sweet spot" can be found where it cuts nicely without chattering. My favourite tool to use is a curved bearing scraper.

 

[Ttrees]

I will indeed post back with my results, but that will be a long while yet, as I have a few projects on the go first.
The tailstock on my cheap lathe needs some work to get it to line up with the head accurately,
and I need to buy chucks for either end to drill out on center.

I recently bought a huge old rusty file that would do the job I think, but that's probably the easy bit.
I would love to see Sawdust vs Manglitters setup as we have the same machine.

Thanks
Tom

 

[Trevanion]

That's a really neat idea, It would be interesting to see it done on a wood lathe. I imagine everything has to be very rigid for the tool not to catch and pull in.

 

[AndyT]

Very interesting!

If, like me, you prefer your wood and metalworking to be done the nineteenth century way, using a cross slide etc still feels a bit of a cheat.

Old books on lathe work illustrate a wide range of specially shaped tools which cut metal with a scraping action much more familiar to a woodturner. I should add that it's a method suited to a slow, treadle powered lathe and I would not suggest messing about poking hand held tools into something with a two horsepower motor attached.

However, I posted one of my first attempts back in 2014, here

post886529.html#p886529

This was mostly done with an engineer's scraper, as mentioned above by rxh, but I have also experimented with the even more historic "heel tool".