What's the story with the table, that's awesome!
-
Welcome back Guest! Did you know you can mentor other members here at H-M? If not, please check out our Relaunch of Hobby Machinist Mentoring Program!
Bench Grinder Lathe Tool Grinding Rest?
- Thread starter MaverickNH
- Start date
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2017
- Messages
- 5,594
That’s a great use of a cast iron table. I have seen junked tables from bandsaws and table saws and never occurred to me to repurpose for a grinder table.
Like most of my home made stuff, it's been an evolution.
Dad used to run a wood working shop, which if he worked with metal, you'd call it a "job shop". One off's, small runs, etc. He gave me a lot of stuff out of the barn (junk collection), which he'd already replaced and moved on, but it was "too good to throw away". A table saw with a warped table, warped fence, and an arbor so crooked that you have to duck when the blade comes around. An old floppy crooked benchtop drill press that he saved out of one of his past jobs with a cracked base, mismachined casting, crooked column (Which I still have and it still works well, you've just got to pay attention to make "straight" holes in anything thicker than a half inch). Just all kinds of stuff like that if I wanted to have a go at it to keep it out of the scrap pile, all I had to do was go get it. That whole collection is scrap metal, but on the other hand..... Sometimes the journey is just as entertaining as the destination, right? Anyhow, he gave me an old bog standard import 14 inch reliant 4 or 5 speed band saw that wouldn't track right, tension right, or just generally work in any sort of efficient way. And the blade guide bracket was broken. But for me, one random thing at a time, not trying to make a living, it cut well, you just had to "work with it" to keep outside of a line. Then the lower bearing locked up and tore up the main casting. I took it to pieces, started to add up what aI could "fix" and what I needed to buy, and read it it's last rights, and that table looked to me like something I wanted at that time, so I cut off the back, "unsplit" half, and saved it. Didn't work... It sat forgotten behind the workbench for years waiting on the next scrap run. I had at the time recently "rediscovered" it, and was working on an old junk lawn tractor, remaking a couple of curved levers (deck lifting levers? I don't remember, That tractor was meant for a small, manicured lawn, and I flat wore it out three times over). Those levers/cams, whatever wrapped around something else, a brake shaft maybe? Kind of C shaped. Anyhow, that flat table idea hit me then, and I carved it out with an angle grinder to fit. That made it really easy to grind up to a line trying to make those long thin swoopy shapes Obviously since the lathe came, it's gotten white wheels, it worked as a crutch as I was getting more proficient at hand grinding, especially threading tools where the angle matters, but then the little finger plate happened for something else, and the pair just worked really nicely together.
