Re: metal spinning

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Posted by Dean T. on February 21, 1998 at 15:18:34:

In Reply to: Re: metal spinning posted by Chris Ray on December 22, 1997 at 23:48:01:

where can you find the books that you speak of? Iwork in a machine shop and would like to try spinning on my so called spare time:

: : Are there any schools available, or anyone that is willing to teach someone that has hands that are all thumbs?

: Chuck: I don't know of any schools or classes you can take but metal spinning is something that you can learn on your own a little bit. Spinning pewter sounds easy enough to do although I would be a little concerned about trying this craft if you are all "thumbs" as you say. It can be a dangerous operation if you are not careful and centering the circular sheet of metal at the start of the operation requires a bit of care and a lot of attention. Trimming the cut off piece at the end of the operation can be a bit hairy too.

: Amost any metal turning lathe can be adapted for metal spinning and what you would need to do is to make a fulcrum holder for the bed of your lathe. If the only thing you would want to do with a lathe is to spin then your equipment problem is easy to solve. Any solid metal turning lathe will work and if you don't mind having worn ways etc, then you can probably pickup an old used unit for next to nothing since they probably wouldn't be good for much else. Still, no matter how beat up, these units would be great for spinning and even wood turning operations, since accruracy within thousands of an inch is not critical with these operations.

: What you need on a spinning lathe is your arbor at the headstock on which you can attach your turned wooden forms and an adjustable tail stock which can be adapted to hold your sheet against the form. Next you will have to make a fulcrum holder which is easy enough to do by drilling out a solid bar of iron and then inserting your fulcrum rods into the holes, placed wherever you need them. Since you have books on the subject of spinning, the illustrations should be clear enough. It's really quite simple. You will have to figure out how to secure the fulcrum holder on the bed of the lathe and there are a number of ways to do that.

: I have made a simple bridge (the fulcrum holder is attached to this) across the ways with a mating bar that is slipped underneath the bed and secured with a bolt. It works well enough and is easy to adjust. You can experiment a little bit with this until you get what you want.

: Forming tools are another matter and it may turn out that you will have to make your own. The best way might be to forge out some shapes on the ends of long steel rods. Normally these tools are set in long wooden handles but they work just fine as a single length of steel.

: I don't know where you can obtain all the equipment for spinning but this operation is relatively unsophisticated and most of the tooling can be either made or adapted from other equipment. The basic tooling is a turning faceplate or arbor, a tailstock to secure your metal with, a fulcrum holder and simple forming tools. That's pretty much it for starters. Oh, one or two books on the subject would be important to have as well. Once you see what is involved in spinning metal, the rest is more or less self explanatory, at least for straightforward types of spinning.

: Spinning shapes with undercuts etc. is a different matter and requires a bit of ingenuity to figure out how to make split forms and the like which would enable you to remove these forms after a piece is spun. That is another subject and I'm not qualified to talk about that kind of operation.

: Chris Ray

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