Shopsmith Forums

Has anyone put additional weight on the ss for the lathe? On most other lathes I hear people use about 250 lbs. of sandbags.

There has been other threads about this. Some people have talked about filling the tubes with sand for weight. Others have talked about weighing down the legs with sand bags. If you do some searching, you should be able to find the threads.

Check this thread out, especially post #8: https://forum.shopsmith.com/viewtopic.php?t=213&highlight=sand+bags

Rudy Osolnik, the late head of the Wood Arts program at Berea College, like the Shopsmith as a lathe and had several in his personal shop -- all sandbagged around the legs. I've used the Shopsmith both ways -- with and without sand bags, and the sand bags help. Sand has a peculiar physical property called hysteresis which reduces vibration and absorbs impact. (It's one of the major reasons the Wright brothers flews their earliest gliders and airplanes over the sand dunes at Kitty Hawk.)

If you don't want to mess with sand, the Universal Tool Rest (555811) provides a massive wheel of cast iron that mounts to the carriage and does the same thing only better. The cast iron is positioned directly under the tool rest and absorbs the vibration before it spreads out to the rest of the machine. For those of you who like to turn thin walls on bowls, you know that machine vibration can be disasterous. This could be a welcome solution.

With all good wishes,

Nick wrote:...If you don't want to mess with sand, the Universal Tool Rest (555811) provides a massive wheel of cast iron that mounts to the carriage and does the same thing only better. The cast iron is positioned directly under the tool rest and absorbs the vibration before it spreads out to the rest of the machine. For those of you who like to turn thin walls on bowls, you know that machine vibration can be disasterous. This could be a welcome solution.

With all good wishes,

Thanks, Nick. Great tip.

How much vibration from turning (e.g. from roughing out a slightly offcenter blank) can the ShopSmith take before you have to worry about alignment problems?

Jim