Recently I have converted to using a lathe to make my yoyos. In the past I have used the router, but I wanted my creativity to be opened up more.
I’m interested to hear how you chuck your yoyo halves to the lathe. I have found that screwing a block of wood to the faceplate, turning it and necking it down to a few mm smaller than the yoyo half diameter works well. I just scrape the end of it dead flat, put some double sided tape on it and butt a yoyo half blank up to it with the live centre. It stays firmly when I back the tailstock away again.
Share some of your methods. I’m always interested to hear what other people do.
When kyo sees this he’ll bless you with lathe information. I don’t know how often he’s working with wood, but there’s probably no one better to share lathe stories with on this forum.
I like your method. I’ve done something similar before with a dead centre fitted into the head stock after drilling into the chuck. It worked well, but I wanted the option to drill only half way into each half so the axle wasn’t visible from the side.
By the way, nice catch there in the side of that maple. I hope you were wearing your brown undies when that happened!
The catch being the missing chunk of wood on the wide base? The base is plywood. Probably just carelessly chipped a piece off when I was roughly turning it into the circle ;D
FYI, the small base is made of purpleheart. After I destroyed the original small base made of plywood I decided to make it TOUGH.
Yes, I thought the chuck was pupleheart, that will last a long time.
How did you manage to perfectly centre the screw in your chuck? I suppose you drilled the hole with a chucked drill bit in the tailstock. My tailstock has so much slop that I can’t drill perfectly accurate holes. It’s an annoying problem that I have to work around.
Ah, that The trick is that the screw doesn’t have to be perfectly centered because it is smaller in diameter than the wood axle. What I do is drill a partial pilot hole in the yo-yo half so that the side away from the chuck doesn’t have a visible hole while turning. After I mount it on the chuck and shape it, I mark the center with a pin prick hole. Then after I take it off I use a drill press with a brad point bit to bore out everything based on the pin prick hole. This makes the axle hole near-perfectly centered. At least good enough for me.
Thanks for the advice. I’ll give that a go and it should be pretty accurate. I simply can’t stand anything that isn’t perfectly concentric or centred; I have a real thing about it. Making really accurate yoyos on a lathe requires so much precision.
I think I’ll also try just butting up the drill bit to the surface of the wood while the lathe is spinning without locking down the tailstock. The end of the bit should find the place of least resistance (the centre) and remain steady, then I’ll lock it down and drill the hole. After that I think I’ll just put some accurate dowel in the hole to fit the halves onto. Theoretically, this should work.
The trick is that the screw doesn’t have to be