Stephen Saar
08-22-2009, 1:34 AM
Hello all, this is my first time on this forum. Just a quick blurb about myself. I'm 25 and work as a software engineer at IBM ISS in Atlanta. I am about to get in to turning and wood working in general, and hoped some people here might have some good suggestions. I've been reading the forum for the last few days and already learned a lot, but now I have some specific questions. I'll try to post them in as readable manner as possible. Sorry if some of these questions are stupid, I'm still learning a lot about wood work and turning in general.
Q1. Regarding the lathe I want to..... err, can afford to buy.
I'm looking at the Jet 1442, and the Nova 1624. I would like to do larger bowl turning, so it looks like the Nova is the better option since it can go to much lower speeds than the Jet can, but I looked at the Jet at my local Rockler store and I liked it alot, it just seems that the low end speed is to high. So does anyone here have recommendations. This will be my only lathe for awhile.
Q2. Creating large bowls
For one of my first real projects after I get a few test and prototype pieces finished is a wooden sink. Basically a 16x16x6 bowl, I'm probably biting off more than I can chew, but what fun is life if you don't just jump right in to the deep end. One of the main things I wanted to know is if you could glue together smaller pieces of wood to make a block that sized and still have a decent turning out of it, or if you have to have everything as a single block of wood.
Q3. Speed of turning
From the reading I've done on different sites I was not able to find any real scientific information on how fast the material should be moving as expressed in MPH or another similar measurement. From looking at what information is out there it appears that somewhere in the range of 13-21 MPH is the correct turning speed, but I was curious if there were any better sources of information.
Also something helpful hopefully -
Note sure if anyone will want this, but in doing my research I ended up making a little excel spreadsheet that lists the MPH or different lathe speeds for a given medium size, and it also has calculations to figure out the board feet for a given dimension, and it includes the capability to look at the prices of different woods online from advantagelumber.com (Note I picked this site since it was the only one that had the information readily available, haven't actually ordered from there so don't know much about them). Figured I'd post it here in case anyone else might want something similar.
Thanks for any help and sorry if I asked a lot of questions.
-Stephen
Q1. Regarding the lathe I want to..... err, can afford to buy.
I'm looking at the Jet 1442, and the Nova 1624. I would like to do larger bowl turning, so it looks like the Nova is the better option since it can go to much lower speeds than the Jet can, but I looked at the Jet at my local Rockler store and I liked it alot, it just seems that the low end speed is to high. So does anyone here have recommendations. This will be my only lathe for awhile.
Q2. Creating large bowls
For one of my first real projects after I get a few test and prototype pieces finished is a wooden sink. Basically a 16x16x6 bowl, I'm probably biting off more than I can chew, but what fun is life if you don't just jump right in to the deep end. One of the main things I wanted to know is if you could glue together smaller pieces of wood to make a block that sized and still have a decent turning out of it, or if you have to have everything as a single block of wood.
Q3. Speed of turning
From the reading I've done on different sites I was not able to find any real scientific information on how fast the material should be moving as expressed in MPH or another similar measurement. From looking at what information is out there it appears that somewhere in the range of 13-21 MPH is the correct turning speed, but I was curious if there were any better sources of information.
Also something helpful hopefully -
Note sure if anyone will want this, but in doing my research I ended up making a little excel spreadsheet that lists the MPH or different lathe speeds for a given medium size, and it also has calculations to figure out the board feet for a given dimension, and it includes the capability to look at the prices of different woods online from advantagelumber.com (Note I picked this site since it was the only one that had the information readily available, haven't actually ordered from there so don't know much about them). Figured I'd post it here in case anyone else might want something similar.
Thanks for any help and sorry if I asked a lot of questions.
-Stephen