Homemade wooden lathe

These pages are about building my wooden lathe.

Part of my goal was to experiment with using wooden bearings for a project. So far, no sign of wear on them. But it would be easy enough to swap out the bearing blocks for bearing holders to change it to sleeve or ball bearings.

Wooden bearings used to be more commonly used. The very hard wood "lignum vitae" is particularly suited for bearings, but I wanted to see if ordinary domestic hardwoods would do for a relatively light duty application. So far, so good.

The lathe is very light (9 kg, plus motor). This makes it easy to put away, but also more prone to vibration than a heavy cast iron lathe. Clamping it down to a heavy workbench mitigates the problem to some degree.

Building the lathe

Building a lathe