Shopsmith Forums

I highly recommend beginning your turning journey not with bowls, but with “spindles”. Meaning anything that’s fairly skinny, such as tool handles and the like. A Shopsmith is great for turning these, but bowls are a lot more challenging. Rockler, Woodcraft, and the like sell inexpensive “turning ki...

Carbon-fiber composites are often machined on CNC routers. The router bits designed for that purpose are typically PCD (poly-crystaline diamond) coated carbide. With a CNC, you could machine the tiller to final shape. For merely flattening it, a simple router sled and one of those PCD-coated bits sh...

Wow, what a journey! The guitar looks great, and I trust that it sounds as good as it looks. I learned a lot from your techniques. My own instinct has always been to get component parts to final shape before assembling. But in many cases, you assembled rough-dimensioned components, and then refined ...

I never followed an acoustic guitar build before, so this is fascinating. What's going on in the glue-up with all the C-clamps?

Ah, so! I can see the gaps now, but couldn’t make visual sense of them before.

edma194 wrote: ↑Fri Apr 12, 2024 2:05 pm Now, over here we have this other Smart Motor that has a dial on it that you turn by hand. Did your grandmother have one of those old tube TVs with a dial to change channels? It works just like that."

I have both, and have turned a few large bowl with them. Here’s a pic of a medium-sized applewood bowl with both accessories in action. Bowl in extenders 2 LowRes.JPG If I had to choose between the two, I’d defintely choose the speed reducer. The UTR is nice, but a large unbalanced blank spinning at...

What are these things that look kinda like little curled handplane shavings?

Good idea, Russ. So moving this tidbit of mechatronics history over from the other thread: ... “Smart motor” used to be a U.S. trademark registered to Animatics Corporation, which engineered the “animatronic” electromechanical puppets that you may recall seeing at Disney World. At the time, “smart m...

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