Arch wrote: (clip) What do you guys want or expect to see in woodturning
lathes for 2010?
^^^^^^^^^^^^
2010 may be too soon for the real improvements to materialize, but this is
what I foresee:

If you want to picture the lathe of the future, you have only to look at the
changes which have occurred in several other technical fields: automobiles,
sewing machines, cameras and machine tools. This will take time, because
the wood lathe of today is very primitive-- at a stage comparable to the
horseless carriage. It's ahead of the horse and buggy, or the needle and
thread, but, wow, what a future. Step pulleys and manually controlled speed
will be replaced by feedback systems, which sense the load, and optimize
the speed.. The tool will no longer get dull. Gouges will be tubular, and
will rotate, so the part that is not touching the wood will pass over a
sharpening system. The design of a bowl will be done on a computer screen,
with a mouse and a keyboard. Once the form is established, pressing
"Enter"will cause the tool to find the wood surface and begin removing
everything that is not a bowl. There will be stored programs, similar to
those in the modern sewing machine, which can produce "features" on demand,
all perfectly formed and completely reproducible.

Of course, the requirements of automation will make it impossible to deal
with the variations in old-fashioned wood. Things like bark inclustions,
excess spalting and odd grain patterns would be death on the idealized
programs of the future. So turning blanks will be manufactured out of wood
/plasticcomposition, to a controlled consistency, with grain patterns molded
in. Every wood blank will come with an ASA rating, which will tell the
computer how it needs to be turned. You will be able to previsualize a
bowl, set up the parameters, set the lathe in motion, and go do something
else. It will be glorious.

There will still be people like Roy Underhill around, who will keep the old
methods from dying out completely, for the sake of a few nostalgia buffs in
our midst.