We were given an old lathe from my husband's boss's father-in-law. I guess he is a realtor and they were helping a widow move. Her late husband had this lathe sitting in a shed for quite some time. The first thing I did was to plug it in real quick just to see if the motor ran. It surprisingly turned on. My dad came and looked at it real quick and his opinion was that it was worth the effort to get it running. I found old wasps nests all over this thing, which didn't even come off when I did the quick motor test.
here's a wasp nest on the end of the pulley you use to adjust the speed
wasp nests inside the switch box, I found a new switch online that wasn't expensive so I decided to not even mess with this one as the red switch part was broken anyway.
super rusty lathe
I made a little part to adjust the tool rest so we wouldn't have to use a wrench each time
I remounted the lathe on a new sort of table top made of plywood and 2x4's. I also had to make the pipe that the tail stock slides on smooth again. The motor was taken to my dad because some smoke had come out of it. We discovered another wasp nest inside preventing part of the motor from working properly. I'm still surprised it ran at all. He helped me get it back to as good of shape as we could and it was ready to try out.
I made a quick tool rest (still hoping the original one is found) and my husband tried it out first because I didn't have a face mask yet and wasn't brave enough to try it myself.
this is after one session of turning, my husband doing most of the work.
the next day I finished it off and turned it into a candle stick holder
It was a lot of fun and very addicting. I think we'll see a lot of my family members trying this lathe out in the future.
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