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Hello guys,

I was a bit frustrate with time and wood I was wasting to make very thin rings for shank or stem inlays.
Usually my pipes have two or three 1.2mm to 1.5mm inlays and I have to cut pieces of 5mm each (best case)
and sand them down till the right thickness. Today I've decided to make a little saw that could be attached to
the tool holder of a metal lathe and cut off rings. I've tested it with 350rpm and 550rpm and it works pretty fine.
Here is my cachectic prototype:



How it was made:
• Blade holder: cheese slicer from aluminium - Really!!! Like this one:

• Arm: piece of aluminium from an old machine. Screws and nuts are not from plastic; only the nut caps are.
• Blade: piece of blade from a bandsaw blade that broken.

But I got a question... is there any easy way of cutting off things on a lathe without wasting too much material
and getting both surfaces faced? I might be reinventing the wheel and I don't know!


eder.

A lot of turners will thin an ordinary parting tool and also grind it so that it is hollow in the middle, with fangs on either side. But your saw looks like it's working well. You'll just have to adjust which teeth are doing the cutting from time to time?

Pretty cool modification you've made there, Eder. The thinnest parting tool I've seen is the one I have and it's somewhere between 2 and 3 mm thick. Looks like what you have works pretty well with the only downside I can see is that the surfaces might need some sanding. I'm far from an expert though. I'm sure some of the veteran turners here have some solutions.

Parting tool. You can make one out of any hard steel that's thin enough for you.

Do you have a pin gage set?

Nice ingenuity Eder!

For that operation I use a cutoff tool. I got mine from Enco, but I'm sure there's a European supplier as well:
http://www.use-enco.com/CGI/INPDFF?PMPA ... M=250-1760

It comes in two pieces, the blade and the holder. The holder is brutally simple, and the devil of the details is in the sharpening of the blade. The page on this site shows proper use and how to setup the tool. It also shows how to grind a standard square cutting bit to be a cutoff tool:
http://www.mini-lathe.com/Mini_lathe/Op ... arting.htm
(I disagree with some of the methods there, but it's a good starting point)

With practice you can cutoff slices of pre-drilled material extremely quickly and accurately. You may also find that you don't need to sand them flat or face them afterward, and if you do need to sand, it's to rough up the surface to give the glue something to hold on to.

Well,
I already tried the regular parting tool I have but, as you guys already told, it damages the internal part besides
wasting a lot of wood. My cheese slicer is not the most amazing thing ever but I managed to cut 1mm rings just
as I would like to.

Thanks Kurt for the links. I'll look forward to get one of those cutting off tools.
They look better and more reliable for sure

eder.

I like it. I'm going to do one. Not for cutting wood rings, my cutoff tool does a good job with that but to cut tubing. My cutoff bit works but tends to distort the inside of the tube as it cuts through the final part of the inside wall. I think a hacksaw blade might not. bob gilbert