Hi all,
I'm trying to turn a baseball bat and running into some issues and I was wondering if anyone might have some advice.
The bat is basically the maximum my lathe bed can work with, and I'm using a drive spur at one end, and a live center at the other - they are slightly off center from each other when push next to each other.
When turning the bat, I get a lot of "jitter" and resting the tool on the top (mainly using a skew for this) I can feel it bouncing around. You can see a spiral on the bat when it is stopped:
There is no way I'm moving the tool fast enough along the rest to cause a spiral like that (the speed is 7 out of 12 - not sure what that is in rpm!). The grain is also ripping somewhat, presumably due to whatever is causing the spiral, even with a freshly sharpened skew.
Presumably the wood will be under stress between the two centers, but I don't think I've got it overly tight, and loosening it off a bit seems to make no difference.
Does anyone have any ideas why this might be happening?
Thanks,
Allan
I'm trying to turn a baseball bat and running into some issues and I was wondering if anyone might have some advice.
The bat is basically the maximum my lathe bed can work with, and I'm using a drive spur at one end, and a live center at the other - they are slightly off center from each other when push next to each other.
When turning the bat, I get a lot of "jitter" and resting the tool on the top (mainly using a skew for this) I can feel it bouncing around. You can see a spiral on the bat when it is stopped:
There is no way I'm moving the tool fast enough along the rest to cause a spiral like that (the speed is 7 out of 12 - not sure what that is in rpm!). The grain is also ripping somewhat, presumably due to whatever is causing the spiral, even with a freshly sharpened skew.
Presumably the wood will be under stress between the two centers, but I don't think I've got it overly tight, and loosening it off a bit seems to make no difference.
Does anyone have any ideas why this might be happening?
Thanks,
Allan