Spring Pole Lathe You Tube

[David Eisenhauer]

I think someone recently asked questions on details for building a spring pole lathe. I just noticed a You Tube video put out by the Wood by Wright guy titled something like "Building A Spring Pole Lathe - Part I".

[chris carter]

Unfortunately, and this is my personal opinion here so others will disagree, is that is a really lousy pole lathe design. It is very popular largely because of Roy Underhill’s legendary status (well-deserved btw) and the fact that there is a free Sketchup file for it. It’s advantage is that it is self-contained (although there are other, arguably much better self-contained designs), compact, and easily portable (although, again, there are other collapsible or knock-down designs). I will be honest and say I’ve never used that design, but I’ve watched just about every pole lathe video on youtube (I’m addicted, I will admit) and pretty much every time I’ve watched someone use that design the thing wobbled heavily and got an extremely low number of revolutions of the stock (which could be alleviated if you scaled things up quite a bit). The tool rest is of a modern style that, quite frankly, is not as effective as a traditional straight piece of wood. I actually do have a modern style tool rest for my pole lathe that I had to make for an awkward project, and while it serves a specific purpose well, the other 99.9% of the time the straight wood tool rest is vastly superior. Additionally, the RU design (which Wood By Wright follows… love his youtube channel btw…) calls for live centers, which is pointless and unnecessarily complicates the build. My opinions of this design are pretty scathing, I know. To be fair, everyone has different wants and needs and that might be the perfect design for them. It certainly does look really neat too!

There are a lot of ways to build a pole lathe. One can watch pole lathe youtube videos forever and see all manner of designs (which is how I settled on my design). Here’s a video that shows how varied designs can be. https://youtu.be/UKIzbs--Yq8?t=28

Here’s a video of how to build a simple pole lathe that collapses for transportation and is also self-contained: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc3G...L&index=7&t=0s

Another self-contained build (part 1 of 2). https://youtu.be/0SDivlmi9cw?t=37

It is easier to find builds for bowl turning pole lathes than spindle turning pole lathes (I don’t turn bowls, but it seems all the rage among green woodworkers). Unfortunately there aren’t many truly great pole lathe build videos because not too many people use pole lathes. But if you watch the two videos above (live centers not withstanding), you can pretty much figure out enough that you can then go watch a bunch of videos of people showing how to use a pole lathe and concoct your own design. There are some absolutely gorgeous lathes out there, and there are tons of plainly simple, yet near equally effective, lathes out there. They are such simple machines that it’s easy to build one that fits the way you’d like to work fairly easily.

Pole lathes are a great cheap way for a Neander to add turning to their arsenal of tools without the complexity (and stationary bulk if you don’t have a lot of space) of building a wheel based treadle lathe. $100 and a day gave me a very solid knock-down pole lathe that I’ve had tons of fun on and made some really fun stuff like table legs, candle sticks, tool handles, wine stoppers, knobs, blah blah blah.

Here’s a recent project I did in an hour start to finish a couple weeks ago. It’s an oiler for my carbon steel kitchen knives to keep them from rusting after washing.
oil 1.jpgoil 2.jpg

A couple other projects…
candlesticks.jpg
table1.jpg

My lathe….
oil 3.jpg

[Scott Winners]

I want a lathe pretty bad. I looked at a lot of homebuilt pole lathes. I was concerned about ceiling clearance. I ended up downloading and printing the treadle/ flywheel plans and article, also by Roy Underhill.

The treadle lathe, I think, I would build with a third diagonal brace at the far end from the drawn two. And I would need a forge for some of the metal work. And the spindle capacity on that 40 some inch wide lathe is only about 16 inches.

For materials cost plus two trips to my blacksmith, my out of pocket is close to a new electronic lathe with a rheostat throttle, a reverse direction and the option of a bed extension- never mind the value of my time to build it.

[chris carter]

I want a lathe pretty bad. I looked at a lot of homebuilt pole lathes. I was concerned about ceiling clearance. I ended up downloading and printing the treadle/ flywheel plans and article, also by Roy Underhill.

The treadle lathe, I think, I would build with a third diagonal brace at the far end from the drawn two. And I would need a forge for some of the metal work. And the spindle capacity on that 40 some inch wide lathe is only about 16 inches.

For materials cost plus two trips to my blacksmith, my out of pocket is close to a new electronic lathe with a rheostat throttle, a reverse direction and the option of a bed extension- never mind the value of my time to build it.

I had the same problem so I redirected the cord on my lathe toward a heavy bench I tied the bungee to (I was originally just going to anchor the bungee to the wall). So it goes up to a pulley at the ceiling and then detours to that bench (the additional pulleys on the bungee and treadle are unrelated to the redirection; they have to do with mechanical advantage). I would love a treadle lathe, but I came to the same realization you came to. Plus, I can knock my pole lathe down in a just a couple minutes as I don't have a ton of floor space and can't leave it up all the time. I only take it out when needed; takes 5 minutes to assemble and string up and I'm good to go.