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DIY wood lathe: photos, drawings

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Our article is devoted to the nostalgia for school labor training workshops. Many people know how to do wood turning, but not everyone can afford to buy and maintain equipment for this. Is it possible to assemble a machine that meets technology and safety requirements with your own hands – let’s figure it out together.

DIY wood lathe: photos, drawings

What GOST says

The good news is that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. The entire assembly process and drawings of each machine module are described in TU3872–477–02077099–2002, and although this document is not in the public domain, it can be obtained on an individual request. Although this is unlikely to be needed: the device of the machine is so primitive that you can easily navigate the intricacies of its manufacture, even from images from school textbooks.

STD-120M STD-120M

Another positive fact – STD-120M, apparently, was designed with the expectation of manufacturing “on site”, so you can either find all the components for assembly on sale, or make and modify yourself. Naturally, if it becomes possible to inexpensively purchase accessories for this machine or its younger brother TD-120 – do so. Factory-made parts are more reliable, easier to align, besides, the unified frame design allows you to assemble one machine from many donors.

Tailstock for lathe

Please also note that standardization of modules largely determines the safety of equipment operation. The basic principles of industrial safety are stated in GOST 12.2.026.0–93, and the rules for electrical protection are set out in GOST R IEC 60204–1. Coordinate any part or machine module you make with these standards.

Bed making

Instead of a cast iron bed, we offer a lighter welded construction. It consists of two pieces of 72nd angle steel, 1250 mm long. It is tempting to make the bed larger for processing more massive products, but remember that such changes require intervention in other parts of the machine. Perhaps you should take TT-10460 as a sample for a meter-long workpiece.

Bed corners

We place the corners on a flat horizontal plane with shelves to each other. We insert calibrated inserts between them so that the bed guides are located strictly parallel with a distance of 45 mm. To fasten the guides, we use two corners, the same as on the bed, 190 mm each, which we put on the front and rear edges. Before welding the parts, it is recommended to squeeze them with clamps so that the metal does not lead when cooling.

The guides are fastened with another 190 mm jumper, in the bottom shelf of which there are cutouts for each corner. This part is installed with the formation of a cell, with dimensions exactly corresponding to the landing spike of the headstock, in the standard version it is 45×165 mm.

Bed for wood lathe

Such a frame can be attached in any way to a workbench or deck, but it is recommended to weld all fastening elements without violating the integrity of the base. If a separate corner is allocated for the machine, weld the legs from the pipe perpendicular to the corners of the bed and, for greater stability, make them a small “brace” with a sledgehammer. Ultimately, the weight of the bed, fastened to the workbench, should not be less than 60-70 kg.

Bed for wood lathe

The assistant

This element conventionally consists of two parts. For both, one type of workpiece is needed – a 50 mm corner, inside which another is inserted, 30 mm wide. They are welded along the edges, as a result, you should get two segments of 260 and 600 mm.

Wood lathe hand tool

The short part is the adjustable base of the handrail. One of the shelves is cut off, but not completely, leaving a 110 mm long segment with an inclined cut. The other shelf is trimmed at right angles 60 mm from the rear edge. From a thick steel plate, you need to make a counter frame, which will clamp the guide of the assistant’s post.

Wood lathe hand tool

To make a rail with a clamp, take an ordinary pipe an inch and make a longitudinal cut in it with a grinder. The resulting sleeve should be about 150 mm long, we put it in a 25 mm corner, orienting the slot outward perpendicular to one of the shelves. We tighten the parts with a clamp and boil along the entire length closest to the shelf slot. We cover the workpiece with a second corner of the same length and attach it to the tube from the back side.

Wood lathe hand tool

The guide is welded flat to the protruding shelf of the adjustment rack from the inside. For fixing, a screw with a long handle and a nut welded to the rail are used. On the reverse side, the striker is fastened with a cotter pin or even a welded rod.

Guide for the handyman

The handrail is attached to a 20 mm rod of smooth reinforcement, which is centered on the outside of the corner piece. The rod fits snugly into the tube of the guide system, and when the screw is tightened, it reliably crimps from all sides. A long corner piece with a length of 600 mm is welded to the bar with a slight slope towards itself and a slightly “sharpened” leading edge.

Wood lathe hand tool

Diagram of a hand tool for a wood lathe

Drive and transmission

The standard version of the drive is an asynchronous three-phase motor with a power of up to 2 kW (usually 1.2 kW), connected to the headstock shaft by a V-belt transmission on double-grooved pulleys. The bed for attaching the engine can be located between the legs of the bed, or on an additional platform behind the headstock, which will complicate assembly, but will make it more convenient to transfer the belt.

Asynchronous three-phase motor for lathe

It is far from always possible to use an engine with the required shaft speed, therefore, the output to the final speed is carried out by adjusting the pulley diameter. For example, if you have a blood pressure of 1480 rpm, then in order to reach the cherished 1100 and 2150 rpm, the diameters of the leading and driven streams should be correlated as 1: 1.5 and 1.3: 1.

When positioning the motor, it is useful to equip the frame with a plate attached to the door sheds. The engine installed according to such a system will be in a suspended state all the time and will ensure that the belt is tightly pressed by its own weight. And if you equip the platform with a pedal, you can change the speed even on the go.

Options for placing the engine on the machine

There are no difficulties in the electrical part either. Switching is carried out with a standard three-phase starting button with a reverse, for such a low-power motor there is no need to install a starter. The only moment is to turn on DC braking while holding the stop button, for which you need a powerful diode bridge (on KD203D) according to the typical switching scheme.

The VFD can be used as direct drive, eliminating the need for headstock design. To do this, you need to fix the engine on the transition platform, in the lower part of which there is a longitudinal alignment spike with a width of 45 mm as a standard adjustment tool for the STD120 bed.

DIY wood lathe

Headstock

Looking ahead, we note that both the headstock and the tailstock include parts that can only be made with access to a metal lathe. Otherwise, it makes sense to think about purchasing ready-made modules or, at least, their cast consoles.

At the base of the headstock there are two bearing housings of the S, V or U type, permanently fixed to a frame made of angle steel. Unfortunately, it is impossible to predict what standard sizes will be available, but in general, the height of the spindle axis above the bed should be at least 120 mm. Given that the diameter of the spindle shaft is about 25 mm, the most interesting is the size of the bearing unit with a total height of about 70 mm.

Bearings in housings

The shaft is turned from round timber of carbon steel with a diameter of 40 mm with a tolerance of no more than 0.05 mm. There are two main shaft variations. The first one is the simplest: the whole shaft remains in the center, then descents are made to the bore diameter of the bearing assemblies, then a thread is cut at the ends. For axial fixation on the shaft, four grooves for the retaining rings are machined.

Shaft drawing for headstock 1 – seats for bearings; 2 – grooves for retaining rings

The second variation has a skirt-like extension just behind the cartridge thread. It is designed to install a flanged thrust bearing mounted on the ledge of the headstock base. This approach reduces bearing wear if the machine is machining massive parts..

The base of the headstock is two pairs of corners or two channels, deployed towards each other. By bringing the vertical shelves together, you can adjust the height of the base to the axial height of the existing bearing assemblies. A 45 mm strip is welded to the bottom of the base, which serves as an adjustment groove. The order of assembly is important: first, bearings are pressed onto the spindle, then the shaft is mounted on a bed with a backing of adjusting steel plates.

Lathe headstock

Tailstock

Making a tailstock is much easier. It consists of four parts:

  1. 100 mm high angle steel base in the same way as for the headstock. Two 50 mm corners are bolted across from above, in their shelves in the center there are cutouts of squares 40 mm wide.
  2. Guide (outer) thick-walled square tube 40 mm wide, 150 mm long and 20×20 mm inner clearance. In the rear part, you need to install a plug with a thickness of 6-8 mm and with a hole in the center of 8 mm, it is fastened with two screws through the walls of the tube.
  3. The inner tube, also known as a quill, is made of a 20 mm profile tube, preferably thick-walled and milled exactly to fit the guide lumen. In the rear part of the quill, an M14 nut is welded, a metal rod is inserted and welded into the front part, widened to 5 mm to fit a double-row bearing.
  4. The drive screw has a thread for a nut in a quill (it is desirable to make a trapezoidal one), in the rear part there is a transition to an 8 mm thread for attaching a flywheel.

Tailstock device

The principle of operation and the assembly diagram of the quill are quite obvious, but special attention should be paid to the alignment of the axes. The guide tube, fixed by welding in the cutouts of the corners, can be raised higher or lower due to the transformer steel shims. The headstock and tailstock must be perfectly aligned, the tolerance is only a couple of tenths.

Homemade wood lathe

As for the method of attachment to the bed, it is the same for the attendants and for the handcuff. Studs M14 or M16 are welded to the bottom of the headstock, and a large ploughshare bolt is inserted into the slot of the handguard. From below, the modules are tightened with nuts with rods welded to them, like levers. For uniform tight pressure from below, a 50 mm channel is placed as a striker.

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Comments: 1
  1. Riley Foster

    Can you please provide more details and instructions on how to build a DIY wood lathe? It would be great if you could share photos and drawings to help us visualise the process better. Thank you!

    Reply
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