As some of you already know, instead of making a homemade drill lathe, I decided to buy this drill lathe kit to start with my first woodturning attempts. At first glance, the lathe looks quite good, but as you will see in the video and as I will discuss in this post, there are some problems I have to deal with.
In the video comments, I quickly received recommendations that I will take into account. The best recommendation I can give you here is to keep in mind that this lathe is completely new to me, so I can only give my impressions with the intention of giving you an idea of the problems you may encounter if you start with a lathe like this, which is more of a DIY woodworking tool and not at all a professional lathe.
A few years have passed since I wrote this post, and I still don’t have a more professional lathe. But have you seen the drill tool kit I bought that includes a much better quality drill lathe kit?
If you are looking for someone with experience in woodturning, I recommend visiting the Miguel Sánchez’s YouTube channel, where he teaches a lot of woodturning techniques and tricks, both for beginners and advanced users, as well as making some homemade tools for turning.
And starting with the turning tools, I began using my regular chisels since I don’t have gouges or any special chisels for woodturning. With the 18mm one, I didn’t get very far, so I quickly switched to the 10mm one, with which I gradually dared to apply a bit more force and managed to remove the hard bark of the oak branch I put on the lathe. When I turned off the drill, I was struck by the appearance of the wood’s surface, where it seemed to have been torn rather than cut. It is clear to me that I will need to buy a roughing gouge and a detailing gouge.
I quickly wanted to try sanding, first with a coarse sandpaper followed by a fine sandpaper. Compared to other woodworking tasks, it’s very surprising how easy it is to sand wood on the lathe, and despite the initial poor appearance of the surface, after a quick sanding, the surface looks great.
The worst problem I have with this lathe is that the chuck of my drill has some play and also a slight misalignment, I think because it has been heavily used and has some bearing wear, which causes the rotation axis to not stay fixed in space but rather wobbles around what should be its position. This causes the turning results to be off-center and probably not perfectly circular. Once I’ve removed enough wood, the distance from the chisel to the piece compensates, and the problem is that I can’t be precise with the pieces I’m turning.
But it also turned out that I didn’t properly insert the drive center into the wood, and at some point during turning, the drive center’s wings bent (to avoid this, I was advised to cut notches to insert the drive center’s cross, so that’s what I’ll do next time). As I said before, the distance from the wood to the chisel compensates despite the wobbling rotation axis, but now with the wood’s position shifting concerning the drive center, that distance to the chisel changes again as it rotates. This causes that when trying to retouch, I cut more on one side than the other, leaving marks with the chisel. And if that wasn’t enough, combining that with my lack of experience and an inadequate tool, as you can see in the photos and the video, the chisel catches and tears the wood. Now I also think part of the problem is that my chisel has a very small bevel angle (since it’s not for turning), making it difficult to support the entire profile on the wood. I should have seen this practical tip for beginners earlier.
There are things to improve and others to change, which I will show you on this blog, as despite the problems, I think I can achieve decent results with this “DIY lathe”. Meanwhile, in this post, you have a video of my first attempt at turning with this cheap drill lathe.
Review: Well, after trying this drill lathe a few more times, the truth is, I don’t recommend buying it. I think we could make a homemade drill lathe that works even better than this. Or else, if possible, save a bit more and buy a real lathe, even if it’s one of the cheaper ones.