Good lathe bench top material to damp vibration?

First off, you should be very concerned about chatter during cuts. I highly recommend a rear toolpost with the capability of holding a cutoff tool upside down. On a small light lathe like yours this will really help. Google this grouop on rear cutoff and you'll find a lot of information. I made one from a kit

and it really helped on parting operations on my 9" South Bend.

I used 1/2" steel plate for the top of my lathe stand. Your point is valid about a large sheet being prohibitive in cost and weight, so I just used a raised pedestal for the headstock and another for the tailstock. Here are the plans:

This lathe stand is very rigid indeed. I am certain that when vibration does occur during a cut, that the stand does not play a role.

Grant Erwin

That's a 9" lathe. For my 12" Clausing, I used a three-bay (two bays plus one single) Sears Craftsman workbench. Also just bolted together sheet metal...totally inadequate. The rear panel is 3/4" plywood. Internally, top, bottom, and sides, braced with 1.5" angle iron. Bolted to the top is

1/4" thick steel plate with 3" skirts for stiffening. On top of that is 1" flakeboard. No vibration problems. For my son's 9" South Bend, a really heavy, home-built wooden workbench with 4x4 Legs and numerous 2x4 internally, 3/4" plywood back. 3/8" steel top, with 3/4" flakeboard on top of that. A "bolted-together sheet metal" bench is fine if you use it a convenient place to which you bolt some really sturdy supports. The "flakeboard" top for my Clausing is actually a cheap kitchen counter formica top. In addition to the front lip, and more important, it has that nice little backsplash. This makes cleanup a lot easier and was a convenient place to mount a full-lenght, full height back splash and swarf catcher.

Boris

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Find an old butcherblock counter top/workbench top. Or bolts some 2x4s together.

Or simply get a nic chuck of I-beam or C-beam

Gunner

"Deep in her heart, every moslem woman yearns to show us her t*ts" John Griffin

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When I made a bench to carry a Boxford ME10.(pretty similar to a small Southbend) I reasoned that the bench top should, as nearly as possible, have the same expansion coefficient AND the same thermal time constant as the lathe bed.

With this in mind I made a sturdy wooden bench topped with three mighty box section steel girders laid side by side and welded together. This assembly was comparable in both weight and torsional stiffness to the Boxford bed.

While this achieved the original aim I hit an unexpected problem - extreme sensitivity of the hold down bolt adjustment. Because the welded benchtop was so torsionally stiff, a fractional thou movement of the hold down bolts resulted in more than a thou taper turn which made adjustment pretty fiddly. With patience I got a good result and the setup has remained nicely stable over several years.

On reflection I realise that the heavy stiff bench top is the wrong way to go.

There is more than meets the eye in the comparitively flimsy sheet metal stands supplied by lathe manufacturers.Because the sheet metal top is torsionally so much less rigid than the lathe bed a relatively coarse hold down bolt adjustment results in a usefully fine bed twist adjustment. The thermal time constant mismatch is of little importance because the resultant bed twist is a result of the spring force of the deflected metal top and this is comparatively temperature insensitive.

Jim