Trouble turning wood and plastics and laminated woods
This is not going to help most turners who own a wood lathe .
But this might give those of you that have metal lathes a Idea.
Pretty much any lathe could have some linear rails mounted on it so a router could be slid along to cut squares into round stock .
Buy one rail , cut it in half, put mounting ends on it so you can mount it to your wood lathe,
make a router mounting plate for the linear rail blocks .
20mm Linear Slide 78-3/4 20mm Linear Slide 78-3/4 [] - $160.99 : Get Hubbed, The Art of CNC
In winter time Plastics and acrylics get brittle in our cold shops.
I have rice in side a couple of socks I put in my micro wave and heat the rice up.
Then I put these rice bags I wrap them around my west system epoxy to make it flow better and not have air bubble issues .
But I would have no issues warming up a acrylic pen blank using the same rice socks ..
My method
This method works really good when making wood round from being square .
If you look closely I am using a standard dead center to spin the wood and I don't have to gorilla tighten it .
My lathe is going 50 rpm as slow as it will go.
My ridged veneer trimmer on the other hand is going as fast as it will go 30.000 rpm.
I do about 50 thousands of cut each pass , finish pass is just a couple thousands .
And I have dial indicator help me gauge each cut.
Another option is to make a jig that pen blank could have the edges cut off by using a jointer or a plainer.
Jointer routers saws plainer Scare the hell out of me , I want to keep all of my fingers ......
So caution (safety ) really needs to be a priority.
The method of using a live router or cutter has worked the very best for me .