Some Days
George Balock
Your lathe is just the worlds biggest and most expensive drill press around. These are fence posts for my raised bed vegetable garden.
Some Days
#1
Some Days
Posts
Re: Some Days
#2Re: Some Days
Don Orr
In our woodworking club there is a friendly banter between "flatboarders" and turners. One of the members does a lot of furniture repair but refuses to admit he does any turning. He does, however, do a lot of "horizontal boring" for leg or stretcher mortises.
Looks like a fun project for you.
Re: Some Days
#3Re: Some Days
William Duffield
I can't tell from the pictures, how long are the posts and your lathe bed? Are you driving rebar partially into the ground and dropping the posts over the rebar? That's one way I've done garden rabbit fences.
Re: Some Days
#4
Re: Some Days
George Balock
William,
The posts are 29" high and they are going over rebar--good call. The horizontal boring machine is made by Oneway, their 2436 model. Who knew one would need 3HP to drill holes?
George
Re: Some Days
#5Re: Horizontal Boring on the Lathe
William Duffield
I've had a recent need to use my lathe (only a Jet 1642) to do some drilling I couldn't figure out how to do any other way. I needed to drill a slightly oversized hole in a block of wood (six flat rectilinear faces) for a bracket in a box to hold some turning tools, including a 5/8" diameter bowl gouge. Instead of finding a metric Colt Forstner bit, I bought a 25/32" twist drill bit on a machine tool equipment supplier (MSC/ENCO), for a lot less $. The shank, however, was not a reduced diameter, and it would not fit any of the chucks for my drill press. 
I couldn't use the feed in the tail stock to advance the bit into a spinning block of wood held in a scroll chuck in the lathe head stock, either.
After telling myself, "You're not so smart after all," I sat down and thought about it a while, and finally came up with a solution.
A Talon chuck held and turned the drill bit in the head stock. I bolted a cross slide vise to the lathe bed with a wood block (flat, again!) to raise it to an effective height, and aligned its feed with the drill bit, positioned the block in the vise jaws, turned on the lathe,
and advanced it into the drill bit. The backer block is just to keep the bit from blowing out the back of the block.
Finished. Disassembly in progress. Note the clamping elements that I had used to hold the vise to the lathe bed. In the previous pics, these were too dark to be visible. Some nuts, washers, long bolts or all-thread and a couple blocks of wood would suffice.
I'll use this setup again for some future tools, using these kits.
http://www.leevalley.com/us/wood/page.aspx?p=69826&cat=1,43838,47843