Slip float lathes

pkocustom · July 27th, 2004

Hello to everyone

I'm about 5 minutes new to this site. It looks great! I have been trying to build a small lathe for building slip floats for quite a long time now and I'm having no luck. I did manage to build one using a small desk top fan motor and some Dremel parts but that broke a while back, it wasn't that good anyway! My question is does anyone have any plans(parts list) or know of a small lathe that can be chucked with a small 1/4" Jacobs chuck. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

clemmy · July 27th, 2004

Just do a Google search for " mini lathe jacobs " and you'll find info on do-it yourself, modifying mini lathes to accept jacobs chucks and mini-lathes that come with them, all in the first 10 results! (I did to try to help you, and there were so many nice results I didn't know what would best work for your application)

hope this helps!

Clemmy

pkocustom · July 28th, 2004

Thank you very much for the tip :!:

Mr B · July 29th, 2004

Check out the Harbor Freight web site. they have a lot of them. Also check out www.rodbuilding.org and do a search for lathes you will get many hits. They use them for turning down cork grips.
Mr B

redg8r · July 29th, 2004

I built something similar to what your describing.

I found an old electric weedeater for 10 bucks at a thrift store. it had a 1/4" threaded shaft which made it easy to chuck up (i used couplers & pins) I added on a tailstock using a 7/8" od. 1/4" id. bearing with a live end.

My wife works in food & wine and accumulates alot of wine corks, I shape em down for floats for my son.

If you could clamp down a var speed drill with an added tailstock like described above, you could get away with something like that too.

If you want a quality tool, look around the web for "pen lathes" these are made for small parts like ink pen barrels.

BigZ · August 12th, 2004

You might want to check out the Unimat1 Classic, it's small and it has TONS of tools on it. My buddies dad is a model train junkie and he would die without the machine. Mill, drill, lathe, disc sander, jigsaw, it does everything..and it's only 300 bucks. They make a basic wood lathe that's a lot cheaper too, but I am sure you could cut more accurately with the mill type cross slides and a fixed cutter. For small scale work the little unimat machine is pretty amazing. I wouldn't cut steel with it but...it's worth a look and would probably be great for making floats. Plus it is pretty small and easily portable.
http://www.morrisandgreen.com/tl0006_detail.html
Good Luck.