Chuck for lathe

lockwood

lockwood

lockwood
Silver Member
Hi,
Thank you for any advice. I would like to learn how to re tip cues. My brother in-law gave me a Delta Lathe. It is about 4 feet long and cast iron. I need a chuck for shafts and full length house cues. It seems to me that most people feed the shaft through the chuck.
I also think I need a way of holding onto the bit. Is this a steady rest?
Thanks,
Jonathan Smith
 
I assume it is a wood lathe ?

You can use that lathe for cleaning and polishing shafts. But without modifications, some of them rather extreme, you may do little else.
The biggest mod is the spindle. Look at the spindle, where the chuck mounts to it. How big is the through hole? Can you run a cue shaft all the way through it? If not, how will you run a house cue through it? Boring it out may be a bigger job than you think, and you still may want a Morse taper near the chuck end to hold a dead center for some work. And you will significantly weaken the spindle when you bore it. It is never easy to make a machine do something it was not designed to do. Without a carriage and gear feed like a metal lathe has you will be hard pressed to accurately do any cutting with a tool or router. Adding one is only crudely possible.
I used to use a South Bend metal lathe about that size for shaft work. It did the job for tip and ferrule work. But it was not long enough in the bed to clean and polish a shaft. A simple cue lathe can do way more and so easily. If you paid yourself a dollar an hour to modify that wood lathe, you would be behind money wise from just buying a Cuesmith, or Unique lathe. Save the wood lathe for cleaning shafts but get a cue lathe before you waste a year making jigs and modifications. The cue specific lathe is ready to do whatever basic repair you desire, right out of the box. Sorry to not give you happy news.
 
Last edited:
lockwood said:
Hi,
Thank you for any advice. I would like to learn how to re tip cues. My brother in-law gave me a Delta Lathe. It is about 4 feet long and cast iron. I need a chuck for shafts and full length house cues. It seems to me that most people feed the shaft through the chuck.
I also think I need a way of holding onto the bit. Is this a steady rest?
Thanks,
Jonathan Smith
Click to expand...


Save yourself some time and money trying to make a wood lathe do the job.
Sure ... it can be modified ... with a lot of work, time, and money and then what do you have?

The cheap way is the wrong way!

Go buy a used Unique Cue Companion and start learning the right way.
If you don't like it or want to upgrade to something better then you can get all your money back by selling it used.
Problem is that most that have one dont want to sell it.
You can buy a new one here:

http://www.uniqueinc.com/cue_companion

If you are not going to fix cues for money then you are better off just paying someone that does that to replace your tip.


Just trying to help with what I have learned over the years.

Willee
 
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