lathe stand build.

[duckkisser]

for those of you who have a lathe set up in your shop i have been contemplating building a lathe bench or some kind of stand. can you post what you have set up in your shop so that i can figure out what i want to do. i have a delta 46-460 which is about 20 inches long plus i would like it to hold my grinder. maybe i should make it long enough to put a extension on in the later stages of my wood working. i have a dresser down in the basement. can that be used for a stand and save myself some money? or will it be too light. how heavy should the stand be besides heavy. i could fill the bottom drawers with sand and pad the top with rubber to dampend vibration.

[rmac]

Here's mine. I used 3/4" particle board for the bottom, the back, the ends, and the vertical panels between the drawers. The ends and vertical panels are set into shallow dados in the bottom and the back. It's all assembled using glue, with drywall screws used to hold it together while the glue dried.

The drawers are 1/2" plywood with 1/4" plywood bottoms. They ride on some nice full extension slides that I got from these guys:

http://www.woodworke...vlet/StoreFront

I wanted the cabinet to be as narrow as possible from front to back, so I mounted the motor in the cavity where the top letfmost drawer would normally go, instead of behind the lathe. The false front is held on by magnets, so It's easy to remove when I need to work on the motor, and also to provide ventilation for the motor when the lathe is in use.

The funny cantilever arrangement for the grinder made sense when I first made the bench because of where it sat in my shop, but I've since moved it to a different spot. If I was doing it over, I would extend the bench all the way underneath the grinder and then either have more drawers or make the existing ones wider.

With all the drawers removed, I can pick up one end of the bench with some effort. So I would guess that the base (without the drawers) and the lathe itself together weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 pounds. With the drawers installed and loaded, it's probably at least 2-3 times that. I'm happy with its stability, but I will say that I don't often deal with big, out-of-balance bowl blanks or anything like that.

-- Russ

[Dave H]

Hey Russ That is a cool disc sander I'm definatly stealing that idea thanks for the pics. Dave

[duckkisser]

rmac thanks that looks realy nice and helps me out considerbly you basicly built a bedroom dresser. which i have downstairs. have you noticed any vibrarion with it when your turning. trying to decide if i need to padd/sand this dresser that i have in the basement that i think is made from particle and ply wood. i plan on puting this dresser on wheels so that i can pull it out of the shop into the drive and turn outside and put away so i dont have to deal with fathers junk or his grumbling.

[rmac]

have you noticed any vibrarion with it when your turning

Yeah, there's some vibration, especially when working with a rough blank before all the corners are knocked off. I've never used a different lathe, though, so I don't have any feel for whether I should be expecting more or less vibration that I'm getting. About all I can say is that the vibration I do get doesn't bother me. YMMV.

-- Russ

[rmac]

Thanks, Dave. There are a bunch of those on lumberjocks if you want to get some more ideas:

http://lumberjocks.com/search_results?cx=016283335483199634424%3A4na88symhay&cof=FORID%3A9&safe=high&q=lathe+disk+sander&sa.x=0&sa.y=0

-- russ

[jHop]

Here's a link to the plans I started from for my table...http://www.woodstore.net/basinsttost.html

Admittedly, mine doesn't look this good. When I cut the dadoes for the sides, I had the lower frame portions reversed on the saw. So three of the four dadoes line up... but the pegboard can't fit into the fourth. So I didn't put the pegboard in the sides. Didn't read the plans close enough to notice that the center shelf rests on blocks connected to the side pegboard. So I don't have the center shelf, either. Which makes it easier to pull a few things off of the bottom shelf, incidentally.

Recently, I had both the lathe and the drill press stationed on top of the table. Didn't need to bolt either down, and both were running at the same time. The grinder was temporarily located on a bench (okay, bar stool) near the table. There was very little vibration on the table, as it was heavy enough to absorb the majority of the tool vibrations. I do have to say, though, my lathe is smaller than the one rmac has shown.