Making a quick Spring Lathe

Description

http://www.thepathfinderstore.com

Dave Canterbury, David Canterbury, The Pathfinder School,Bush Craft ,Survival skills, Historical Lore, Primitive Skills, Archery, Hunting, Trapping, Fishing, Navigation, Knives, Axes, Fire, Water, Shelter, Search and Rescue

Tags: Bushcraft,Survival,David Canterbury,Dave Canterbury,Pathfinder,The Pathfinder School,Archery,Hunting,Fishing,Camping,Primitive Skills,Fire,Water,Shelter,Navigation,First Aid,Search and Rescue,Signaling,Prepper,Preparedness,Self Reliance,Survivability,The 10 C's,Knives,Axes,Saws,Bow Drill,Ferrocerium Rod,Ferro Rod,Tarp,Hammock,Canteen,Cooking,Longhunter,Trapping

Video Transcription

morning guys Dave Canterbury with the Pathfinder school I've been out and about for a while now doing some filming for a new television series and haven't had a chance to make a lot of youtube videos so I thought what I'd do today is I would start a little project that might take me a few episodes or videos to cover and I've been wanting to make a spring pole lathe for a long time out of traditional material with traditional tools and woodworking and mortise and tenon joints and things like that and wedge together so you could take it apart but I thought what I would do is because I've never used a spring pole legs before and this is kind of new to me as far as how everything works and how it's set up I thought I would just make a very common man version of that and go ahead and use some scrap --is-- type material use some electric tools and drills and saws and things like that to be able to assemble it quickly get the thing together in kind of a miniature fashion I'm only gonna make a 4-foot long bed on this lathe and then we'll see how it works and I can make adjustments from there when I upscale to a more traditional style raw material type lathe so that's what we're gonna do today I've got twelve two by fours here and these twelve two by fours came from a lumberyard and they are kind of like the dregs of the pile from the two by fours these are just 2x4 right or 2x4 studs so I got them for about half price so I probably have about twenty-five thirty dollars maybe in this lumber and then I have a few screws bolts and nuts and lags and things like that that amounts to maybe ten fifteen dollars top-end

so I know that I probably don't have forty dollars in this lathe when I'm done and that's buying the material if you scrounge hard enough you can probably find this stuff a lot closer to free but I wanted to go ahead and get it so I could start the project we're going to kind of do it on the fly from memory I'm not going to use a drawing or a plan so if you follow along with me you'll be able to make a plan off of what I'm doing and we'll talk through it as we go stay with me and we'll get started all right so since we're making a four foot bed on our lathe we're going to cut our first two boards at four foot even that will make our bed slightly less than four foot but that's okay so we'll come out here four foot will make a mark with our knife at the four-foot mark just like that come in here with our old-timey square down cut it off okay the next thing we want to do is remember that we're miniaturizing this a little bit and we want this thing to be about waist-high at the bed so for me that's going to be about 37 inches so if I measure 37 inches up on the bottom and that's where I put the bottom of my bed I have the good side of this lumber in for the bed itself so that the head and tailstock sliders will work inside there okay so now we have our bed made we're going to put our head and tail stock holders and I'll show you how we're gonna make those now we're gonna make them out of tripled up two by fours with one mortise and tenon joint to hold things in place for tightness and I'll show you how that works but this is our basic frame it's done now we just need to make our heads tail stock holders and our actual machine that's going to be a windless type device that will move stock on our lathe okay so these are our sliders or our head and tail stock that go down into our bed an 18 inch 2x4 and I just used a random measurement to have plenty hanging out the bottom to put a mortise in so I could put a wedge through there I just cut to 6 inch pieces here because that's how far I want it sticking up above the bed and then screw them together again with drywall screws to give myself a block there and these sliding blocks are what's going to hold our workpiece in place and create our spindle for our spring pole we'll talk about that just a minute

the way this works is you're more disjoint sets down inside the bed like this and slides forward and back so you can adjust on the bed and then all you have to do is put two wedges in here like this and you can't tap those wedges from both sides and that will lock this in stationary for your head of your tailstock I'm showing that to you from above well loosen these wedges up what you would do is you would slide your head of your tail stock mounting piece where you want it then you would take these wedges and reverse them like this so that they're pushing up against each other you put them in that mortise hole that you created push them together and then as you pound them in they will tighten this up so your head of your tailstock can't move once it's in a position you want it for leaving okay now we're gonna take a piece of all four head and we're just going to to give us a point and this will be adjusted through our tail stock and head stock pieces to hold our spindle the important thing here is just to get a good even cone shape on the end of this because this is going to hold your peace it needs to be fairly sharp and not necessarily a pinpoint [Music]

okay the next step is to drill our stock to be able to accept this what I'm going to do is I'm going to use nuts on both sides of this so my plan is I'm going to counter bore that's just a little bit bigger than it needs to be and I'm going to stay in the center of this board and measure down

- about right here like that and then we're gonna go ahead and throw it down this size

[Music]

now we will go ahead and put our nut on this piece here and run it all the way up toward the top here just like this then we're going to run this down through here when they have to give it a tap with a hammer here you have to go down all the way and we want is we want this nut to be kind of jammed into that wooden just like that and we're going to go ahead and put a stop nut on the back side as well with a washer and we could cut this off if we wanted to we don't have to have all of that space sticking out on this back end if we don't want it but for now I'll just use a stock material and the hardware still when I'm not cutting anything off as far as the length goes of this right now and then we can just tighten this into here all right so now what we've got is we've got two of these and I've taken this when I drilled it through this back side and locked it in place here and just a little bit of an angle so that just really forces this thing to be locked in but it's just as easy to drive it out of here and move it back and forth if I want to but this just gives me a good stationary place for my spring ball for my string to go up and down this one slides completely this will come out if it needs to once I lock this in place these two points are going to allow me and you can see they're almost dead even just a little bit off right there these two points are what's going to allow me to lock a piece of wood in here and spin it on axis that's what these two points this headstock and tailstock are really for so when you get your piece in there you lock it up against here you wedge it in so it's tight and it can't go anywhere pop it a couple times with the hammer you're good then you can start spinning now let's set that portion up okay so now you need a simple windlass type engine and all I did just to play around was I took a rope to my ceiling rafter and put a bungee cord through a loop ran a piece of cordage down around my stock twice and then down to the floor on another piece of 2x4 that becomes a treadle so that when I walk over there and stand and push that treadle up and down like this it moves my stock just like this so now we have an engine we have the stock turning now what we need is we need some kind of a tool rest and obviously we need a tool