turning a barrel

M

msalm

Member
I have a barrel laying in my shop that has heavy flutes... I was considering turning the bugger down to a smaller contour but was thinking of the possible problems the flutes might cause. One thought was to fill the flutes with Devcon to try and minimize the interupted cut that would surely cause vibration problems. I would also cover the lathe ways to try and keep that bedding dust off of them.

Has anyone ever tried this? I'm not too keen on trying it, but it's a good barrel just sitting there that would be a perfect candidate for another project if it were just LIGHTER.
 
turning

I am sure it would be a real bugger to turn with out getting a lot of chatter .
However if you are not going to use the barrel what have you to lose. Give it a try and let us know how it works.

Make sure you use sharp tool bits and make sure you are on center.

Chris
 
How much trouble it would be depends alot on the weight of your lathe, good tooling, proper setup etc. That being said: I would set the barrel up in the lathe with only a couple of inches out of the chuck, and take a rough cut just deep enough to remove the flutes. Then advance it out a couple of inches and pick up the cut, and so forth until the flutes were gone. Then you can reset and turn normally.
 
Another thing you could do is make a couple of collars to slip over the barrel. Bore these to fit the taper and have them tightly fitted, as in driven on, in a couple of locations along the barrel. Run your steady rest on these and give it a try. Use HSS as carbide won't take the interrupted cut for long. Go slow and bring a book along.

Dave
 
Turning Down

Why don't you try milling most of it off first,if you have a milling machine to use.That will eliminate a lot of the problems with an interrupted cut.
 
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