Freehand Turning of Metal

borrowing a page from the Watchmakers...

Lot’s of great work can be done, and some only done, via freehand techniques.

Here are some ideas and examples

To the left is turning a small brass bushing for an indicator hand.  The hand is crimped onto the bushing which is a press fit on the indicator pivot(the rev counter on the Helios indicator below)

Freehand turn with a graver on a watchmakers lathe
Freehand turn with a graver on a watchmakers lathe

Another shot of a set up with a rest for graver work

With a tiny faction of a horsepower and tiny work, turning off of a tool rest is fine for balance staffs, but what about full size work? 

I don’t feel it’s safe with full sized work, in this case on a 7.5 hp lathe.  A grabby tool could spoil your day.  Needless to say, obey all safety rules (no gloves, no loose clothing etc) as getting your hands close to the revolving work increases the risks typical in a shop.

The story starts with a solid platform to replace the cross slide

A big piece of flat cold rolled or plate steel will work just fine.

I chose to make life complicate and wanted a T slot platform out of cast iron.  It lets me do other stuff with it such support a tool and cutter grinder of do line boring

and why not scrape it to fit while we’re making it complicated?

There is a very practical reason for this.  When you use it with say a tool post grinder you want things solid and lathe rigidity depends on all elements of the ‘pancake stack’ being solidly bearing on each other

The basic idea is this floating tool post.  feed and cut are controlled by hand but it is solidly supported by the plate from.

Dig ins or grabbing is far less likely…. but pay attention to your tool grinds, height and ALWAYS have zero rake for brass

What can you do with this?

Here is an infeed handle I made for a small lathe.

Before going freehand , I first measure the diameter of the original at various parts long its length and then using a parting tool, plunged to those diameters along the work.   As well, I hacked out material between the parted spots, otherwise known as roughing

It is almost indistinguishable from the factory original

Here is the brass pull knob from my “Ultimate Vise Stop” article, another time this technique was used

Ultimate Vise Stop

Another project was replicating this Schaublin 70 lever action tailstock lever. 

The freehand turn was the easy part – whittling the other end, mostly with files, was the challenging bit.

I hope this idea helps, its very simple to do and tool up for but opens up new possibilities