Taking a stand…

 

…and going to repurpose it. Actually it goes something like this. There has been some unrest in the garage this winter. It started with the chop saw and plasma freakin’ out on the band saw and just as they all settled down and started getting along the lathe decided to throw a hissy fit. It turns out that it can’t understand why the milling machine ended up getting a stand built for it with an integrated tool box when he, the lathe, has been stuck doing all the machining and he only rests on top of the useless factory stand. I couldn’t argue; the lathe had a point. His factory stand is completely useless. The stand is about 4 inches too low, there is a center section with a big hole in it that takes up cubic inch shop space, and the two side cabinets make for very poor storage space. I had been watching for a deal to come up on an extra wide tool chest and final one emerged. I managed to score a 40 inch wide upper tool cabinet with ball bearing slides. So the lathe is going to get a new stand and the old factory stand will get taken apart and repurposed. I think one of the cabinet stands will get turned into a belt sander stand, we’ll see yet.

The idea is this; to build a more useful lathe stand. The criteria are as follows; raise the height of the stand up probably 4” to help save my back. The new tool chest is going to get the lid cut off and then mounted into the stand just below the lathe. I’ll see how much room I end up with between the floor and the bottom of the tool chest. I plan to add at least 1, if not 2, shelves to hold my turning stock. The chip tray will be built similar to that of the milling machine. It will be water tight in case I decide to add coolant sometime down the line. An addition I am desperately looking forward to is an integrated back splash; I am tired of making a mess of the wall behind the lathe from the cutting oil that gets tossed around. If my mental design pans out then the stand will also get a 2 foot double florescent light fixture as well as an upper shelve to hold some supplies.

I started the build with fabricating the adjustable feet. Since the height of the feet will play a factor in how high the stand is built I needed to determine foot height first. The design for the feet is the same as I use for all my other hockey puck feet. I start by drilling a 1” hole 90% way through into the puck. I like to keep the bottom of the hockey puck sealed to the floor just to keep the moisture off the threaded leg. The legs all get chopped out of a 3 foot section of 1” threaded rod. The threads then all get cleaned up on the lathe. I usually use 1” washers to weld onto the threaded 1” rod however I don’t have any plus I don’t think they look very nice. I still had some 2” seamless pipe with .5” thick walls leftover from the metal bender project. I trimmed off 4 slices and cleaned them up on the lathe to use as the support washers on the hockey pucks.

The base of the stand where the threaded hockey puck feet will get screwed into was made from 2 x 2 x .100” square tubing. I took four 1” coupler nuts and cut them to length so that they would fit inside the square tubing. The nuts then get tack welded in place and will act as the threads for the adjustable feet. The square wall tubing then gets capped, welded and ground to finish them off. Now that the time consuming feet issue has been dealt with I can start on getting the main frame of the stand mocked up as well as plasma off the top of the tool box.