Hi Prometheus

Sorry but I have to disagree with a bunch of things you are claiming
here.


The first is that most wood lathes (at least, the ones I see) are a
gap-bed style. To fit and use a compound slide, you sort of need ways
that are made of a solid piece. A person could always mount ways on
the gap bed, but you'd lose some swing, and it'd be tough to align
properly (IMO.)

A lot of metal lathes are gap bet lathes also, and not just the small
ones, both large lathes we had in our shop where gab bed lathes, and
one had 26" swings and the other one more , don't remember the exact
swing, also the one I turn on now is a gab bed lathe.


The second is that a belt drive really isn't good for metal turning.
You want back gears if you're going to be turning slow, so that all
the torque isn't lost, and you need them if you expect to be able to
cut threads. Its another thing that could be worked around, but my
big concern with that was that I would have had to cut away parts of
the headstock, and what would be left may not have been enough to do
the job- a lot of products are engineered to be "just enough" and
putting extra stress on them like that will make them fail.

Only a few years back really, and all lathes where belt driven, ever
seen those pictures with banks of lathes and long leather belts coming
down from big wooden pulleys on one shaft up high, that drove all
those machines.

Well the old lathe I learned machining on was a flat belt driven one,
it had all the auto feed and cross feed for turning threads etc., but
you did have to manually change gears, those lathes had very often
double reduction gears on the headstock so you could turn large work
pieces very slowly, remember this was before carbide tool bids, speeds
had to be even lower than today, as HSS was the best there was.

However I would not choose a shopsmith to make metal turning lathe out
of, there are much better wood lathes to use for that, I don't think I
ever even would consider doing this, but that's another story.

Have fun and take care
Leo Van Der Loo