Help with crazy motor project please

I'm not that good with a chain saw. A coarse belt on a good belt sander can remove an awful lot of material quickly.

A lot depends on the shape of the blank too. I'd be easy to build it up from 2X6 lumber shaped with a saber saw and then glue up a round blank. If a belt sander won't cut it, renting a floor sander might do the trick. Or you could just cheat and build up a pulley from plywood disks.

It's an engineering problem and sounds like a lot of fun. I built a five foot (long) coil turning lathe to turn out Tesla coils and had so much fun turning the end caps and mandrels that I went out and bought a wood turning lathe. The coil lathe got adapted to making a large kilowatt-class induction coil to excite the Tesla coils and later on a winder for an alternator rotor and transformers.

My mistake, I thought you were making a wooden pulley. You need the weights because you want the pulley to be a fly wheel too?

George H.

Yeah, I think plywood discs would be what I would try.. Make a jig to cut circles on my band saw, glue, screw and done.

George H.

The lathe was available from the factory with either foot drive or overhead drive. For foot power the large diameter pulley was indeed a flywheel. It was common practice when foot powered lathes were being built to have an apprentice provide the power while the journeyman made the parts. Anyway, my lathe was sold with the overhead sheave (pulley) option but the legs for the lathe were also machined for the foot powered option. It appears that the only difference between the two options is that the foot powered models came with the treadle, large sheave, and the connecting bits while the overhead drive option was the same lathe but missing the foot stuff. Apparently the overhead drive option included the overhead sheave mounted on a short shaft and a couple bearings to support the shaft. I gleaned this info from pictures of advertising in various publications. Eric

I used the ends from wooden wire spools once, to make a winder for large degaussing coils. I found the sizes I needed in the scrap, and simply bolted them together. Then I mounted it on a bearing. I used a spent rifle shell for the handle to turn it, as I fed the magnet wire onto the form.