Woodturning Lathe

This is my home-made wood turning lathe. I made this in my spare time over the course of about a month, mostly using material I had stored in the workshop. The only things I bought for the initial build were the motor and the variable speed drive that powers the motor (although since completing it, I've bought some chisels, a chuck and various other bits and pieces to go with it).

These are some of the first things I made with the lathe:

These are a set of new handles for my most often used chisels. The handles are made of English Walnut, which might not be the ideal wood for chisel handles, but it's very pretty and I had a block that was fairly short but thick and wide and I couldn't think of anything else I was likely to do with it.

I made a few pens and pencils out of American Black Walnut as a means of practising the techniques, along with a couple of bowls out of Sycamore (the first one is shown above).

I also made a large (about 250 mm diameter and 70 mm thick) bowl out of beech, mainly to test the capabilities of the lathe.

While I was making the lathe, I posted regular updates (with lots of photos) here and on a couple of forums. You can read all the details of the build on the blog page

3D Model

I've included a 3D model of the woodturning lathe, although it's worth noting that the CAD model isn't up to date with the latest changes to the design. Nevertheless, it should give you a good idea of the construction.

If you have a relatively modern browser, you should be able to drag the model below around with your mouse to look at it from different angles. The left mouse button will rotate the part, the right mouse button moves it and the scroll wheel zooms in and out. On mobile phone browsers, one finger rotates the model while two can be used to pan and zoom. Note that the model may take a few seconds to load.

This website is free and ad-free, but costs me money to run. If you'd like to support this site, please consider making a small donation or sending me a message to let me know what you liked or found useful.