As I talked about in my post about the die I made in my machine shop class, I mentioned I spent the whole class working on the mill and only had one night left to play with the lathe.
Last night was the last class and I got to work on the lathe and made two replacement knobs for my router table with the help of Alex the shop assistant showing me how to work the lathe.
Here's the result of my first night playing with a lathe...
The second picture is of the knob in use on the router table.
Because both the plastic handles broke I've never really been able to tighten down the fence as well as it needed to be. It was good enough that I never bothered to do anything about it, but always a pain because I had to be careful not to push too hard against the fence because of the danger it might move. I could have just picked up a couple of nuts and used a wrench on it but it was not bad enough to do that. But still, it's bugged me all these years that I had to deal with the broken handles.
I didn't get the knurling correct - still need to work on how to do a good job on that, but even with the poor job of that, it functions just fine for what I needed it to do.
Learning how to do these simple metalworking projects just totally changes my view of what I can build and fix now. It's just such a joy to have those knobs fixed and to know how to make these sorts of things. But now, I've got to add a basic lathe to my wish list and learn more about what you can do with it...