I Tried the Cheapest Lathe on the Internet

so I peed a little bit um what’s up everyone welcome back to the shop I’m a little excited today because I’m going to try out a new tool which is a mini lathe I’ve always wanted to get one because I’ve got little Parts I want to do like a drawer pull or a box handle so I looked online to see if I could find one and I noticed that there were several that were really really cheap so that made me kind of Wonder just how cheap can I go here so here we go this is the cheapest one I could find online and uh we’re going to give it a shot I picked this up on Amazon and I think it was like 30 bucks and that is a complete kit so it’s supposed to have a bunch of accessories with it but I did look online and see could I find it cheaper and well I did there was uh one on eBay or two on eBay that were same exact lathe they were a few dollars cheaper and then I found it for as cheap as 10 bucks it didn’t have the accessories just the lathe itself but ten dollars well there you go so little it’s so tiny and a six piece wood carving knife set so these are my lathe tools well that wasn’t wrapped very good all right so what do we got here uh let’s get a little bit of heft to it looks like it’s a drill chuck and uh it’s on a piece of aluminum so I guess worst comes the worst I could just take this whole thing apart and just use the piece of aluminum or something because you know I could always use that not really seeing a whole lot of components here we got a motor that is uh completely exposed and uh I don’t know how to use this here are the sweet tools uh carving set with all these things which I imagine have to be absolutely sharpened to the Pinnacle of Excellence we’re going to find that out let’s see how to use this thing uh this isn’t a lot of information saw blade installation I don’t have a saw blade bead tool I didn’t get a B tool it’s working time well I guess we should know what the limitations of the tool is each you shall not exceed two hours all right I mean this is small fair enough machine must be shut down for 15 minutes operation shall last no more than one and a half hours turn the drill chuck to install the threaded fixing needle which I think is this guy here seems right I’ve never used a lathe before either so that’s why this is going to be kind of fun we’re going to clamp the wood to that needle and then push the thimble to clamp the wood so it avoids falling off plug the power in and turn it on how do you adjust this thing there’s like Wing nuts way back here and then there’s screws here okay those are so I gotta move this housing too are there other instructions on this if you do not really understand the operation it is best to consult a professional person I’ve been a person for a long time I feel like that I might be a professional at this point but I do run a woodworking YouTube channel so even if I’m not a professional person I have to qualified as a professional woodworker right because you know YouTube the motor worked for 30 minutes please stopped 15 minutes it says it has seven levels of speed but I’m not really sure power adapter has numbers 12 15 16 17 19 20 and 24. there’s a rhyme and reason behind that I imagine I just don’t know it all right I looked online I didn’t really find any instructions so I’m gonna use this dude here that uh has the screw welded to the end of it I know that this is kind of a hybrid of of like a bigger lathe that has a screw chuck to it um mine just really looks like a literal screw it did have these hexagon rods that it says you could also use but I have no idea how to use these I’m sure somebody online uh that you know could tell me in the comment section but I could not find anything that told me what to do with a hexagon Rod if I put this up here it looks like wow it looks like the needles are dead on as far as the height goes so uh that’s cool I’m gonna start off small I got a piece of Poplar here because well it’s small and it is super soft so I figure if I can’t do anything with Poplar then I don’t think I’m gonna be able to use like hard maple on this but uh we’re gonna try Okay this uh what is this this is uh three and three eighths and that seems like I’m maxing it out without taking this Carriage off which I don’t know that I need the The Carriage I’m not I’m not really sure if that’s necessary or not so uh we’re gonna do without that all right uh-huh right right push this guy up Wing nuts locked here’s my worry about this well one of my worries is that uh it it’s kind of light the motor is heavy I’ll say that the motor is heavy there’s no weight back here at all so I think whenever I start doing this it is going to just spin around like a helicopter and fall off it hit me in the face let’s hope not you might want to see that I don’t want to see that all right I plugged in the power so I peed a little bit um and the tail stock went all over the place so yeah um [Music] [Music] I think that’s the lowest setting which is scary uh let’s uh move it up one foreign number four out of seven there is no way in the world I would use this at the highest setting that was sketchy and it only got to number four so whenever I turn it on it moves a lot um yeah I gotta figure out a way to clamp this thing down all right that’s better I just took a couple pieces of MDF and made some holes here so I could put some bolts in good thing about this thing is it does have that extrude aluminum so it was easy for me to make a quick jig clamp this to my bench and that ain’t going nowhere so I feel much much safer at this point this thing came with a whole bunch of knives that uh kind of suspect on the quality of these things I mean they feel pretty sharp but I feel like I can also just bend this in half with a pinky I should probably say a couple caveats one is I am not a lathe expert as in I’ve never used lathe in my life so this will be fun second thing is I should probably say that I am in no way affiliated or paid in any way to promote said completely unlabeled tool this exact thing is sold by so many people that I don’t know if there’s a company that can even claim this so all the opinions in this video are completely mine obviously so I guess now we try it out and if I die I die [Music] [Applause] that little flimsy screw well now it just fell out so it doesn’t I don’t I I don’t know so I guess I’ll cut the end off of this and then drill a really tiny hole and try to re-screw it back but it didn’t last very long um you see I didn’t even make it fully round yet part of this could definitely be my skills or lack thereof part of it could be that the fact that my Knives have already developed a terrible Burr on the back side of them because they’re so flimsy and this is just popular but um a little bit worried about that it wallowed out the hole so wide that it just falls off the lathe foreign [Music] unbelievable I actually made a thing it’s not an identifiable thing that I would use for a particular whatever but it’s something and I turned it and it looks rather beautiful not too bad for uh really really crappy tools these are awful I mean some of them have like chips in it so as I was doing it it was actually chipping out the wood so uh what I did was went over to Amazon and bought some actual tools so these are some carbide tools I don’t know the brand name of them I’ll put a link down in the description below but they had insanely good reviews a lot of reviews so I got a set of three of these so now we can eliminate tools as an excuse for my crappy turning I got a piece of cherry let’s try it again foreign [Music] I might have flown a little bit too close to the sun because I broke my cherry piece but it still looks pretty good what I did do is grabbed a piece of hard maple and tried it again had wow I made something it looks beautiful I like it this video is not about my turning skills it is about this particular tool and I’ll leave it up to you to formulate your own opinions now I highly recommend you check out this other video up here and to meet again get in your shot and build something awesome …

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