On Thu, 8 Mar 2012 10:26:52 -0500, Wild_Bill wrote:

Sov n'a gun.. I found 2 pics of the 9x20 lathe spindle hand crank.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/5234515...7629540058769/

The 9x20 spindle bore is about 3/4" for a judgement of scale of the size of
the parts.

Talk about never throwing anything away.. well, the pics were transferred to
this PC when it was the new replacement, back when I was still building a
personal metalworking website (concept scrapped since then).

This handwheel model was a second version.. the first one used a length of
flat aluminum bar stock for the crank arm instead of the cast aluminum
handwheel (free upgrade, given to me by a friend, the ball bearing "speed
knob" was added from junk box parts).

It looks much as I pictured it from your description, other than the
snazzy handwheel.

I suppose that it would work the same if both parts of the tube were
drilled for clearance and a pair of locked nuts were jammed on the end
of the threaded rod. It wouldn't look as nice when it was out of the
machine though.

Or it would probably work much the same if the thread on the end piece
was not locked, and you used a screw/bolt instead of a stud and a nut.
The thread turning in the end piece would draw the stuff together.

I guess there are lots of way to do this. The only tricky part seems
to be drilling a fairly small hole down two inches of rod, and I
suppose that is straightforward on a lathe.

Bob