sethile wrote:Very cool machine! This strikes me as essentially the best of both World's. Very similar to drilling by hand in terms of the advantages of shaping first, only here you also have the advantages of clamping the stummel perfectly into position (well one hopes anyway) and holding it there without worrying about being pulled out of alignment as you drill. Do you use this for the draught hole and mortise too, or just the chamber?
Usually just the chamber, though I may change that. At the moment I still usually drill the mortise and airhole on the lathe using the centerline and guidepins. I'm not crazy about guidepins though, they end up sliding or scratching too often even using drops of protective glue (I do a lot of horn-stye shapes with steep underside sweeps that leave little for a guidepin to press against).
When I have the chance, I'm going to rummage in my vast pile of tooling and see if I can adapt a tiltable peg to my carriage, to use like so:
That is an excellent way to drill an airhole - Just center the drill bit to the bowl-bottom peg, pop the stummel onto it, and the bit will go right where it's supposed to.
sethile wrote:
It strikes me that it might be possible to work something out as a retrofit for a metal lathe tool carriage. Maybe just customizing a vice with shaped soft jaws and welding something to it that would allow it be swapped out with the tool holder.... Not sure if there is enough hight available to pull that off on mine or not....
I think it would require some expensive custom machining. Pipe shapes are so different that you need a lot of latitude in the chuck for it to be workable. If you'll look very closely at the chuck jaws in my pic, they work as follows:
Soft wood jaws in different shapes that are easily popped on and off as needed to fit a pipe. I've epoxied thick rubber padding to each to avoid any marks at all, and the gripping surfaces are covered in adhesive-backed 80grit paper for best grab.
The adjustability is the thing, though. The chuck is self-centering, BUT...
Each jaw can rotate independently, like a clock hand.
Each jaw has independent angle swivel, allowing them to tilt toward or away from the drilling mount.
The whole chuck can be rotated in place (Not all pipe shapes are drilled head-on, after all), raised or lowered (to fit various bowl-side centerlines), and cranked from side to side as needed.
I'm not saying you couldn't achieve some of this by fiddling around with a lathe carriage, but I'm afraid you'd pretty quickly find yourself very limited in terms of what you could drill unless you have the ability to basically maneuver the stummel in three dimensions to fit every possible center alignment.
sethile wrote:
Trever, have you ever been to the Genod shop? I was looking at some interesting pics of their operation:
http://www.synjeco.ch/pipesandtobaccos/ ... enmake.htm
A couple of pieces of their tooling are reminiscent of some of yours. They also have some that look more like fraizing machines than yours do... Sounds like they are really cranking pipes out of there!
Never been there, but I have a lot of that machinery here in the attic or tucked into corners of the workshop. I'm amused to see he's got my same wooden sanding spindles! I love those things.
