For this project, we made a tabletop wood lathe for pen turning.  For research, the team got trained on the full-size wood lathe located in Olin's machine shop and examined other existing wood lathes, such as Dylan’s tabletop wood lathe (see images below). 

We decided to scope to tabletop size to reasonably build a lathe over a few weeks for the final event in Mechanical Design. We focused mostly on the parts of this project relevant to the class curriculum in Mechanical Design, such as the belt drive. The belt drive that we designed was inspired by the pulley system we observed inside the transmission of Dylan's wood lathe. As a result of the scope of the class, we decided to design a simplified tailstock system just for our pen-turning use case. (See an example of a simplified tail stock we found while researching below). 

Throughout this project, the team used many design and manufacturing skills such as: modeling assemblies in shape, creating part drawings for machining, laying out cut sheets for the waterjet, manual milling, welding, turning using the metal lathe, angle grinding, setting up precision angle cuts on the bandsaw