Shopsmith Forums

I'm a new user of a Mark 5 500 I got used. I haven't set it up yet, but have been watching various videos on Youtube of simple starter lathe stuff. Many of the examples that go beyond a rolling pin seem to be things like round boxes and I recently saw a whistle video. Most of these seem simple enough to start - get an adapter, get a chuck that can grab a small piece of wood, install and try it out.

Until they swap the non-rotating tail part for a forstner drill bit to hollow the thing out. Can you somehow mount drill bits stationary on the other end of the shopsmith? It seems like swapping over to somehow clamping the thing for a drill press mode or the like would be fraught with getting it aligned and very slow. But my online searching doesn't seem to be working to get an adapter for the tailstock to drill chuck or whatever.

Am I just missing something?

You just need a chuck on a 2MT arbor. You can get this arbor and mount your SS chuck:
https://www.shopsmith.com/product-page/ ... -all-marks

Or you can get tailstock chucks from many other places

A nice starter project, after rolling pins, etc., are salt and pepper mills. Check out the post I did before at the link below. It has a really useful instructional video on how to make them. Definitely need to mount a stationary drill chuck for projects like these. A tailstock arbor lets you mount the drill chuck as HopefulSSer mentioned above.

viewtopic.php?p=319341#p319341

FWIW, the ss uses the quill feed to advance the rotating workpiece onto the stationary drill bit held in the tailstock.