Fall 2023 Showcase: Penn State Industries Tailspinner

Penn State has really added an innovative change to LATS with this tail spinner edition. Absolutely. It's, you have a 0% chance without this, of maintaining the exact center when you flip that ball around, uh to work on the other side. And this is gonna allow you to maintain precision center every time. It's a great way to go.

So, Paul and I are both avid turners and have seen a lot of laths in our days. Um, and Penn State has really jumped the fence on this one like the, this is one of these like really for me. So, um, tell people what's, what's cook, it's called a tail spinner. So there's a little bit of a spoiler alert for people once you think about it. But, um, what's going on here?

Yeah, it's a total. Aha in the world of wood turning where basically gives you the ability, well, in its essence, gives you the ability to s to attach its chuck onto the, onto the live center. Uh, and, and that's gonna allow you to take the, the, your workpiece spin it around. Maintain perfect center which anyone who's ever tried to get something remounted, knows that it's impossible. You just plan on and a little bit off, 0%.

You're gonna, you're gonna lose something. That's your translation. So there's, there's that benefit, I think also the ability to, I use a vacuum chuck a lot and that gives you the ability to spin it around. Use the chuck on this end and slide that into the vacuum. Chuck perfectly centered.

And that's, that is impossible to do as well. So you're transferring it over. So the vacuum check is holding it, but it's giving you perfect Centricity as you do that. Yeah. So it's the gist of this is that it's not unusual for the tail stock and to spin, what's unusual is that the tail stack is spinning.

Normally, it's a live center. Um, but the bearings on this are here. So that's a one inch eight thread on there. You're gonna see more of this in a second. Um So we can put anything with a number two M taper.

It can go in there anything with a one inch eight TP, I can go on there. So let's look at, um, it's gonna make more sense to you when we watch this video where I start here. Finish here. When I show you Penn State's new tails spinner, this is gonna be your opportunity to go mind blown. This is a complete rethink of a lathe.

When we look at the tail stock, we're used to the idea that this cone will spin, it needs to because the head stock is driving something. But if you look closely what's happening here is that this cone is not on its own bearings. It's the tail stock that has bearings. So when I take this out, I have a lot of options here. This is a one inch eight TP I shaft.

So I can put a chuck on here. I could put a spur center in here. I could put the cone that was just in here in here. So it changes the dynamic a lot because it's going to give me the opportunity to chuck reho move things around, maintain center as I go from this end to this end, maintaining the mounting device. So what I'm going to do here is get set up with a bowl on the lathe in a completely different configuration than you're used to seeing.

So here's what I've done. I've put my chuck on the tail stock end. Now it's spinning on those tail stock bearings. If you want to lock this up, there is a knob right here that lets me do that so I could get this to not spin if I needed to. In this case, I do want it to spin.

The bowl is mounted on a screw truck and on the face of the bowl, I've set that up so I can engage with my drive center. So I'm gonna drive this whole assembly from the heads stock and the way to think about this now is that this is going to be the bottom of my bowl. This is going to be the top of my bow. So I'm going to do some rounding, I'm going to do some shaping and then eventually we're going to flip this whole thing around. So here's where we're at outside is pretty well shaped.

What I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna use this lock in order to lock up the tail stack because I don't want it to turn. What I'm going to do is pour with the forner bit in order to create the recess for the chuck, you'll see all this come together. Now, I'm ready to turn the whole system around. So what we can do here is tail stock is still locked and through the magic of tails spinner, we change from this end to this end, come off my screw truck. Ok.

OK. Get on my jaws. And now we're in a spot you recognize from conventional turning and at this point I can come back in and start hollowing. So the thing with tails spinner is that once this is in your shop, you're going to see more and more applications where you can take advantage of what the tails spinner does. So cool product from Penn State.

Cool addition to the lathe here it, when I saw this, this is so different, you know, when's the last time you saw it like the last big change on a lathe was, was electronic variable speed. Um, so innovations in the turning world, you just don't see all that much stuff happening. You put me in kind of a tailspin. I got like three good ones in a row. So I think, you know, we've thought of a couple cool applications of this.

I, I'd be interested to see if anyone has any additional, uh, thoughts on how they would use something like this. It'd be, it'd be very fun to hear from other Turners. Um, they're probably doing some work around now to make this happen. Um, but yeah, if they had access to this, what would you do?