Swarf

 I'm learning to use my lathe from Youtube, and there are quite a lot of videos about what your first turning project should be. My first one was just making some chips off a bolt head to see if I could get the thing cutting. My 2nd project was to make a handwheel for a friend's watchmaker's lathe. He's also recently become a lathe owner and his lathe is too small to make its own handwheels. I didn't make a very good job of it. I've now thrown myself in to job 3 which is to make a strong and airtight catchtank out of aluminium.

A good friend of mine acquired a lathe a few years ago. It came with the house he bought (my mum once got an elderly pet rabbit in the same way). As he's a few years ahead of me in self-taught turning I asked him what he'd done on his lathe. His answer was poetic and honest. "I've turned valuable stock into piles of swarf".

I'm close behind him. Every operation I do my proposed catchtank design gets smaller and thinner.

Richard "CCMT06" B