Duplicator for Grizzly lathe

[Jay Jolliffe]

I have a Grizzly G1495 lathe & would like to add a duplicator to it. Grizzly doesn't make one anymore. Has anyone installed an aftermarket one to your lathe?..If so who made it & how did it work out. I have to make 60 balusters the are 3" x 13" tall. Short stubby ones.

[Brice Rogers]

Jay, I see that Griz still sells a lathe duplicator that fits 4 lathes including the G0584 (14" swing like yours). It is their model T27313. I suspect that if you look at the on-line manuals for the two copy attachments, you'll figure out whether it will directly fit your lathe or may need some mods.

[David Boardman]

I have a veil duplicator with the angle grinder attachment. It's has taken about 15 hours of work to get tuned but it is now. The finish quality leaves a lot to be desired. I spend about double the time sanding as I do turning and start at 40 grit. I would say if your lathe can slow down to about 20-50 rpm you could get a really good cut. I have the g0766 and it can only go down to 100 rpm.

[Brice Rogers]

It seems like most duplicators use a scraper principle. Scrapers often produce tear out - - requiring a lot of sanding.

I'm wondering if a person could use a small (#1 or 6 mm?) positive rake cutter placed on an angle (22 degrees or more) so as to do some sort of a shear cut. This won't work with some profiles but may work with some.

As an alternative, I suppose that a person could make kind of a "story-board" with pins positioned at the key inflection points. Then, use a parting tool and caliper to cut the proper depth, followed by normal turning and comparison to a master pattern.

[Robert Henrickson]

You'd probably be better off doing it with calipers and story stick. You will do far less sanding. Once you start, you will find that your eye is a very good gauge. I've turned a lot of duplicates -- a duplicator is not needed. The balusters do not need to be 'absolutely identical' -- en masse, minor variation will be lost visually.

[Mark Greenbaum]

If I ever have to make a lot of copies of any spindles, I will make a masonite template of the profile, and construct a tracer at the bed level, with a diamond shaped carbide cutter to carve the spindle. That would get most of the work done to shape the spindles. I've seen circular saws used as cutter for mass production of saddle tree components in Ashland City a long time ago, and there's a video on Youtube of a guy using a router as a cutter. So anything is possible.

[Dennis Ford]

You don't need a duplicator for a run of 60 spindles, just turn them normally. Take your time on the first one and make it the pattern. Set up a story stick or a set of sticks to mark out location of features. Use multiple calipers and/or 1/4" plywood with cut-outs sized for the various diameters. The first few will take quite a while but don't get discouraged as you will develop a cut sequence and muscle memory that will make the later ones faster than using a duplicator.

[Mark Greenbaum]

My first exercise with spindle and skew was to make 20 magic wands for my daughter's Harry Potter themed birthday party. I turned the first one, made a story stick, and replicated the others to match (sort of closely). They went fairly quickly (5 hours to make all 20 - 1/2 hour was cutting 2x4's down to 3/4" squares x 20" long). I see your point Dennis, but if you wanted exact copies, a tracer would be a good project.

[Marvin Hasenak]

For this type of production I would use a semaphore rig. https://books.google.com/books?id=1vkDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA47&lpg=PA47&dq=semaphore+jig&source=bl&ots=tBaHGvY6Fa&sig=40BBl2YxlZRKhOTNtqfa3p-rA7w&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wjGPUJXNF--CyAHejoCACQ&ved=0CB8Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=semaphore%20jig&f=false

There was a magazine article about making a semaphore jig for a lathe that goes into more detail, but I cannot find it now.

[John Nordyke]

would the overhead-light-casting-a-shadow-on-the-ways trick work in this situation -> turn the first spindle - tape paper on the lathe bed - place a light directly over top of spindle - trace the shadow - now start mounting new blanks and with the light still on trim to get shadow to conform to original tracing.

[Brice Rogers]

Today I toured a production shop that makes architectural turnings. The vast majority of their work is on duplicator "Lathes" that follow a pattern. One of the lathes rotated the part at about 100 rpm but removed material using a roughly 12" carbide saw blade running at a high rpm.

Another one used a unique (at least to me) cutter that kind of shear cut. The part was spinning at around 3000 rpm. The surface finish was still a bit rough but better than I would have expected from scraping.

I took a look at the cutter. It was shaped a little bit like a Vee-shaped bowl gouge on very end but the vee flute only went in a short ways. It was introduced to the wood on the tangent. So it was actually shear cutting rather than scraping. They shaped the turning in two steps. First they used a more rounded cutter and follower that made the piece to within about 1/4 inch of the final shape. Then they changed to a more pointed vee and cut the final form. The feed rate was pretty slow, so even though they were taking off 1/4 in in depth, they were advancing perhaps 5 - 10 inches a minute. In this machine the cutter was pointed upwards and the wood was rotated into it. I snapped a couple of pictures of the cutter for those who may be interested.


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