I haven't posted in this forum before, but I am hoping that someone can advise me about what kind of setup I should get to enable re-centering of large fairly lightweight turnings. The diameters are mostly 8 to 16 inches, and the weights under 5 pounds.
I build banjos, and turn the rim (the round part) on a Shopsmith. So far I have turned well over 200 on faceplates. I bolt the little Shopsmith faceplate to the center of a larger disk of 3/4" particle board or 1/4" aluminum and either use screws to hold the blank to the faceplate, or in cases where the holes would be a problem I use hot glue. This works fine for a lot of what I do, but there are times when it would be nice to be able to take a rim off after turning it, and turn it around so I can cut a rabbet in the bottom side to accept a metal flange. I have only made a couple of resonators (the Frisbee shaped thing on the back of some banjos) but I'll be making another one next month, and for that it would be nice to be able to turn it around so I can turn both the inside and the outside. The resonators are a bit under 14" in diameter, so there's only an inch between the outside of the piece and the tubes of the Shopsmith, so I don't know if that's enough clearance to any kind of outside gripping jaws. I'll attach a couple of pictures to give a better idea of the kind of shapes I'm working with.
I have read about various kinds of chucks and jaws and things, but I don't have any actual experience with them, so I'm hoping to learn about what kind of thing would be best. My top priority is precision and repeatability of centering, in order to fit the wood rim to the metal parts it has to be pretty close. I hope to get an actual lathe in a few years, once I have a larger work space, so it would be helpful if whatever I need for the Shopsmith was also able to be adapted to a bigger lathe in the future, but that's not essential. Thank you for taking time to read this and for any advice you may be willing to share.
Zach