Is your lathe big enough

My Taiwanese BH 1326 lathe will turn 13" diameter, or 18 3/4" if I take out the gap piece (that's rare), when I bought the lathe I looked at others, including Myford, and a clone that had a large bore spindle, M 4 taper, and that was before Myford did their one! It was made in Taiwan, and the seller had tried it, and found it more ridged than the real thing, and at least as accurate. That was mid 1980s so no digital scales. A close second was a Russian make, but it was a few hundred dollars more, and I'm too tight to pass on what proved to be a bargain. Ian S C

   Re turning flywheels in situ, the main problem there is getting the rotational speed slow enough, especially in the old days with carbon steel tools, on some wheels(big) it would be minutes per rev, rather than revs per minute,  maybe twice that with HSS.  Just that a moderate sized FW might be 6' diameter, and 12' would not be too unusual.

Edited By Ian S C on 07/03/2014 10:19:30

.

A little off-topic but: the man with an even bigger mill might have room for this big square[!] Hofmann Rotary Table.

MichaelG.

That;s why they used to have large apprentices -- hand cranking duties.

I was thinking in using the drill press one might need to jury rig a very large pulley (9-inch pulley off the lathe countershaft comes to mind) to slow things down enough. And/or let the belts loose to slip a bit.