Shopsmith Forums

Alex, you asked

When turning between centers how do you position the tool rest for items say less than 6” long? I can’t seem to maneuver it where I need. Any tricks?

If the 8" tool rest is to long to position it properly because it hits the headstock and/or tailstock you can get the 4" tool rest made for the Mark V's. The lathe tool rests have not changed much over the years and the mounting hole in the arm is the same size for the Model 10's and Mark series machines. Below is a link for it in the Shopsmith online catalog.
https://www.shopsmith.com/ownersite/cat ... olrest.htm

If the problem is the position of the arm in relation to the diameter of the stock you may have to get more creative for a solution. It may require a custom arm or other setup parts.

You may want to look at the book Power Tool Woodworking for Everyone. It has a lot of information in it on using the Shopsmith tools. The 1st edition was written for the Model 10's and following editions for the Mark 5/V's. The current edition in PDF is here on the Shopsmith website. The 1st Edition in PDF is available linked here on the forum.

Current Edition
https://www.shopsmith.com/academy/introduction.htm

The 1st Edition is available on Everett's My Google Drive from the Maintenance and Repair section under Shopsmith Large Format Drawings, Illustrations and More. There is a lot of additional information available there in restored documents.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... itUlMDt6_x

Phoeff99 wrote:
When turning between centers how do you position the tool rest for items say less than 6” long? I can’t seem to maneuver it where I need. Any tricks?

I’m sure I will have many more questions as I begin to use this but have found so many answers already among these posts and the documents you have all shared already. Thank you!

Alex (aka Phoeff99)

Push the carriage to the left, close to the headstock. If you need more space to get the tool rest where you want it you can extent the quill a bit.

Also, although the advise is to get the tool rest "as close as possible" to the work, it does not mean "almost touching", Somewhere in the 1/4 to 3/4" range is fine, even a bit more if that is "as close as possible"..

This is set up with a pen mandrel, but you can see how the tool rest can extend past the sides of the drive and tailstock centers (live or dead)