Redneck lathe

I would cheat.

Borrow a 1/2" drill motor. Wrap a couple layers of masking tape evenly around the butt end of your workpiece. Chuck up the taped end and brace the body of the drill motor (with the power cable facing away from the center of the earth) against your belt sander table. Run both sander and drill so that your workpiece axis is oriented at right angles to the belt.

With the drill motor 'upside down' like that, your workpiece will be much more controllable and won't tend to tear holes in your belt. It will tend to 'kick' *away* from the belt when it catches. This is devoutly to be desired.

This also works for putting a neat chamfer or radius on the end of your workpiece.

--Winston

Get a drill press and a big file :-)

Bruce-in-Bangkok (correct Address is bpaige125atgmaildotcom)

Smiley or not, it worked. On the other hand, you have an issue because the center is turning but not moving relative to the file, therefore not cutting. For flat, I like Winston's approach. I've used similar.

I had the manual skills (verbally) beaten into me in Jr High wood shop. The old Swedish cabinetmaker who taught it made us plane and file blocks of wood square enough to show light evenly against a try square before we could use the power tools. The experience made us really appreciate accurate machinery and able to do a good job where the common machines don't help, like sharpening a plane or chisel blade.

Filing an end square is much easier if you have a long guide surface. In this case you could hold the cylinder in saw grooves between two blocks of wood and use the outer edges of the wood as the guide. A good coarse file cuts steel pretty quickly and a "hand" or "pillar" file makes a nice finished surface. Put some tape on the wood so if the file hits it will catch the tape rather than lower your guide surface.

Jim Wilkins

On Thu, 15 May 2008 23:14:31 -0700, with neither quill nor qualm, "Michael Koblic" quickly quoth:

This is gonna be one of those "Hey, y'all: HOLD MY BEER & WATCH THIS!" posts, isn't it, Mikey? ;)

Yes. Before you need machining work again, find someone local who has a small machine shop and become friends with them. The digits you save may be your own! Advertise in the paper if you have to.

"WANTED: Friend with machine shop to help make fun small stuff."

- Press HERE to arm. (Release to detonate.) -----------

--FWIW a pal of mine from the old neighborhood made an R/C helicopter back in the very early days of same, using a file and a drillpress. Impressed the heck outta me and everyone else who saw it fly!

Well, if that's what you want, I can help.

I've seen grown adults that should have known better chuck the work in the drill press spindle, grip a lathe tool in the drill press vice and hand-feed it into the work while it spun. Not recommended.

Pete Keillor wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

For a similar "project" - I didn't have a sander like his - I simply center-punched the end of the piece and, then, worked it on a clamped-down file until the center hole disappeared.

FWIW, it helps - a lot - to have the file clamped down so that the edge toward the center of the piece is barely _at_ the center. This allows the file teeth to function properly and provides an "escape route" for filings.

There is no doubt that there are exceptionally skilled people out there. In the old country, where needs must, people would make all sorts of things out of stuff they had available.

I was into ham radio then and made my share of stuff, but what some of the others could do was amazing. There was guy who reproduced the Collins "S' Line (a top of the line transceiver with a power amp and a tuner) by painstakingly making his own component parts. In the process he had to make all kinds of special tool (coil winders etc.). He made the national magazine.

Others believed in adaptability and liberally adapted assorted Wehrmacht equipment to their uses with considerable success.

Sadly, I can only dream of that level of skill.

It is good to now that great minds think alike :-)

I have try it again, this time with the file only. I suspect that the sand paper screwed things up ever so slightly. Maybe even get a new, bigger file, one that is not over 25 years old...

Clamping down - essential! I tried that hand feed thingy but had to dodge the end of the file once too often... BTW my indicator of success was appearance of pleasing concentric rings.

What, next thing you will be telling me to buy my meat in the supermarket!

LOL! I actually thought about that...too scary even for me!

I use my mill as a redneck lathe. I even bought a R8 backed lathe chuck for this purpose. Works kind of OK.

i

Get a selection of good ones and don't dump them all together in a drawer. My largest file rack is a plank hung vertically on the wall with pairs of finishing nails driven in at a downward angle to hold several dozen files. I used a triangular strip of wood as a guide to drive the nails.

Jim Wilkins

Now that is interesting, I had a similar thought just an hour ago: Would a

3/8" end-mill work in a drill press? My drill runs slowest 720 rpm but according to the tables this should be OK for mild steel - certainly for drilling. Does this applies to mills, too? I would have thought the feed speed will be critical but maybe not.

It will certainly not work if you are on a morse tapered spindle. The drill chuck will fall out due to transverse forces.

Even when "worn out" and/or seriously abused, files make good raw material for knife blades.