Looks like I haven't lost my touch, as yet. Heaven Can Wait! Great name for a B-24 Liberator in those circumstances. Thanks for posting those photos, Double D.
From Division Artillery, Ron,
"A friend of mine is turning his 3 car garage into a recreation room. He has a big flat screen TV, a no hold-em polker table and a 13 ft. wet bar. It is decorated in a southseas--Pirate theme. Well, you can't have Pirates running around a bar that long without a swivel gun. Ask Tropico. Soooo I went into the shop and started wood chips flying, ala Zulu. The first pix is of construction. Stock that size really jumps around till you get it trued and balanced."
Ron, Just yesterday we were thinking of putting an odd shaped, heavy piece of steel on the lathe to turn a journal on the middle part and Mike reminded me of our first experience with turning a heavy steel round of 4142 pre-hardened gun-tube steel weighing 240 pounds. The piece was hot-formed and had a nasty, protruding seam down one side. It was the summer of 2003 and we just had the lathe delivered two months before. The plan was to just turn a smooth 3" band near the tailstock end so it would rotate nicely in the steady rest and the 3 jaw chuck. When he started the lathe, this round jumped so violently in the steady rest that Mike jammed the brakes on after about one and a half revs. !
We removed the chuck and the steady rest, put a faceplate on the lathe and the 90 degree milling attachment onto the Bridgeport, drilled two No. 5 centers into the calculated center of the round on each end of the rusty beast and a 3/8" lathe dog pin hole an inch from the outside edge on one end. After tapping a steel pin into the lathe dog hole, we put the unruly round between the faceplate and the tailstock, live-center securely.
It still rotated out of balance, slowly for three heavy passes, but not like it did when we thought the destruction of the steady rest was imminent! Sometimes it's hard to remember exactly what you learned in a school class 30 years ago.
Tracy and Mike