On Wed, 9 May 2007 09:49:21 -0700, "Charles Friedman"
wrote:

In the current issue of one of the metal working magazines (maybe Home Shop Machinist) there is an introductory article of a series on upgrading and modifying an old shopsmith to do metalworking. The pictures and the mods look very interesting even if you do not want to work metal.

That's very nearly the route I went with the metal lathe I'm building-
I had the midi lathe sitting around unused, and was seriously
considering building a compound slide for it before I sold it and
decided to build the metal lathe from scratch.

There are a couple of fairly big barriers to doing it, but nothing a
determined guy couldn't work around.

The first is that most wood lathes (at least, the ones I see) are a
gap-bed style. To fit and use a compound slide, you sort of need ways
that are made of a solid piece. A person could always mount ways on
the gap bed, but you'd lose some swing, and it'd be tough to align
properly (IMO.)

The second is that a belt drive really isn't good for metal turning.
You want back gears if you're going to be turning slow, so that all
the torque isn't lost, and you need them if you expect to be able to
cut threads. Its another thing that could be worked around, but my
big concern with that was that I would have had to cut away parts of
the headstock, and what would be left may not have been enough to do
the job- a lot of products are engineered to be "just enough" and
putting extra stress on them like that will make them fail.

OTHO, if you wanted to turn metal and aren't that worked up about
precision, there is a way to do it freehand with a three-point tool
called a graver. I haven't tried that myself yet, but it's definately
on the list of things to do one of these days.