Treadle Lathe

mudfoot

Dave
Senior User
Originally posted in Turning, but I think Hand Tools is more appropriate.

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I built this gnarly treadle lathe from Roy Underhill’s “Lathe from a Loft” article in a past issue of Popular Woodworking. I dismantled the kids’ old playset early this summer and repurposed some of the wood to build this lathe. One can hardly tell the wood had another life before it turned into this lathe (sarcasm). I followed the plans pretty closely and worked on it sporadically on weekends starting in late summer; it took about four months. In capable hands, this is probably something that can be built in one long weekend, but I’m an advanced novice and I muddle through things, even with plans to work from.

The most difficult parts for me were cold hammering the live center and drilling a hole perpendicular to the face of the flywheel. The live center came out ok after some filing. As for the flywheel…well, it’s a little wobbly, which is why I mounted the three-quarter inch pvc pipe to the ways; this helps counteract the wobble and keep the rope in the groove.

I vacillated between these plans and a set of plans in Richard Starr’s Woodworking with Kids book that uses a bicycle chain and freewheel as the driving mechanism (see photo). While I liked the idea of using bicycle parts to power a treadle lathe, I felt there would be less guesswork using the Roy Underhill plans so that’s the route I took. That said, I’d still like to see Starr’s lathe in action. I did some fairly thorough searching online for builds of his lathe, but I came up empty. Has anybody out there seen one on line or in person? I’d be curious to know how well the design works. Perhaps if the wobbliness of my lathe becomes its undoing, I’ll try to build Starr’s lathe. In the meantime, I’ll have to practice drilling perpendicular holes.

Incidentally, other than the book and a couple of articles from the 80s, I could never find any more recent work from Richard Starr. I’m curious as to what became of him; he seems like a talented guy.
 

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