A perfectly valid question.

The fact is the standard pullies are a specific size. Regardless of what
size they
are, they are a specific size. Does one actually NEED the standard pullies?
No; my lathe has been run without them for at least a decade.

The first reason (pulley) size matters is the cutting tables that came with
the lathe.
They are all wrong if the pullies are wrong. Second, I bought a nice
visual aid -- essentially a 3-dimensional graph, where the common
cutting issues on this lathe are addressd. It is useless if the pullies are
wrong. Third, just for the sake of completeness, it would be nice to
have the standard pullies. Finally, I do have all the tools required
to make the pullies, so this seems like a good project.

A few years back I cut some pullies out of solid aluminum for use in
some very nice snatch blocks. This was done on my mill, using a
ball endmill and a rotary table in vertical mode. It was a near tangental
cut, and I cranked the table on the mill to get the right depth.

When my neighbor moved out he gave me (literally) a pile of very heavy
cutters for horizontal mills. They have removable teeth. Right now I am
thinking about an R8 stub arbor using one of these removable-tooth
cutters. I can grind three teeth -- left, right and bottom -- to make the
cut.


"JMartin957" wrote in message
...

The key problem is the large pulley cannot be cut on the lathe. It will
not
fit.


Do you really need a pulley larger than a 10" for that lathe? Seems
awfully
large to me.

John Martin