I purchased a Grizzly G5979 12″ x 35 1/2″ swivel head wood lathe about a year ago. It was cheap and now I think I know why. When it arrived it was missing some parts so I had to send out to the company for the missing parts. To make a long story short, 3 months after receiving the lathe I finally had all of the parts I needed to use it. I found that it didn’t turn concentric circles so my pen blanks could not match up with the hardware of the pen kit. Not much of a error, but definitely enough to notice every time I picked up the pen. I tried to return the lathe and was told that the thirty day period for a cash refund was over. I was furious because it took 3 months to get the parts from the company to be able to try it out! To their credit they paid to send it back to them so that they could fix it as part of their one year warrantee. They sent me a brand new lathe in stead, that is better but still doesn’t spin exactly true.
Does anyone know how I can adjust the lathe head stock so that it will spin circles instead of ovals? Mind you they are small deviations, but I have to do a lot of sanding on bowls and platters to hide the deeper cuts when the blank turns closer to the chisel. I have given up on making pens because the variation is too great, but I am not ready to use this lathe as a boat anchor just yet. Pretty close though. 🙂
Thanks
ds
Replies
ds -
I'm having trouble understanding how a lathe could be made to turn anything but a true circle! (grin). Given that there's no play in the headstock spindle, it should just go round & round and anything mounted on it (securely) should be equally as round.
No, for spindle turning as in pens and such, I'm not sure if it would make a difference, but the headstock may not be accurately aligned with the tail stock. One way to check is to invest in a double ended morse taper that fits your lathe. Stick it in the tail stock, bring the tail stock up to the headstock (gently) lossen the locking mechanism for the headstock and shove them together. Tighten down the headstock and now the two should be properly aligned.
Again, I don't know if this would have any bearing on your problem but I know the first Delta lathe I had with a rotating headstock, turing it from outboard back to parallel to the lathe bed, it was rarely accurately aligned. I don't do pens so I never noticed any descrepancies as you describe.
As a side note, I just finished a book on turning techiques where the author desribed many of the old 'ornamental' lathes used to do off center and such turnings. Perhaps you're on to something here! (hehe)
Dennis in Bellevue WA
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