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My Home Built Rose Engine Lathe (Build # 2)

After using my original Rose Engine Lathe for several years and creating many items such as bowls, lidded boxes and numerous other items, I decided that it was time to build another Rose Engine. I wanted to include several new features and capabilities in the next Rose Engine.

The following photos and text describes the process of building the Rose Engine Lathe.

Creating the headstock

As I started planning and designing the new Rose Engine, I knew that the headstock would be the most difficult part, after much thought and consideration I decided to build a casting furnace and cast the headstock out of aluminum. After many hours researching on YouTube "how to build a casting furnace" followed by many more hours "how to cast aluminum" I started to work. I built the furnace out of an old BBQ grill propane tank, found an old aluminum Jeep car wheel and cut it into small pieces on my wood cutting bandsaw using a bi-metal bandsaw blade. I built the pattern for the headstock with wood and used the pattern to create a sand mold to pour the molten aluminum into. The cast aluminum headstorck was then milled to specifications on my milling machine. The last photo shows the base headstock complete with bronze bearings and oil cups.

Turning the spindle, pulley and phasing wheel

The spindle, phasing wheel and drive pulley were all turned on my 1946 9 inch South Bend. I could not find a suitable spring for the spindle pumping action return spring, so I purchased some music wire and made the spring. The first spring was too weak, the second spring was too strong, the third spring was just right. A thrust bearing allows smooth rotation of the spindle and the collar can be adjusted to provide the correct pressure on the spring. The last photo shows preliminary assemble of the headstock with the phasing wheel and a rosette.

Final Assembly of the Rose Engine Lathe

The Rose Engine Lathe Spindle is powered by a stepper motor. An Arduino Uno R4 microcontroller with a NextGen touch screen display is used to control the stepper motor, it provides Start/Stop, Forward/Reverse and Spindle Speed Control. The NextGen Display also displays spindle RPM and counts spindle revolutions, a reset button will reset the spindle revolutions counter to zero. The revolution counter is also reset to zero when the Start/Stop or Forward/Reverse buttons are pressed.

The cutter positioning is controlled by a Rockwell/Delta compound cross slide. The Makita Variable Speed Compact Router is an excellent cutter for the Rose Engine.

A cable/pulley system is used to maintain headstock/rosette pressure to the rubber/touch, pressure can be adjusted by adding or removing weight from the container.

Still have some tweaking to do but the Rose Engine Lathe (build # 2) is ready to go to work.