From the wilderness of Monroe, WA
 

My name is Ohio (yeah, really) and I'm pretty interested in metal spinning. I am way better at it today than I was three days ago when I started.

(Actually, I tried spinning last spring and sucked at it, so I'm already showing progress. It's always good to be less crappy at something you like doing.)

I can weld---they hold, but they look terrible. I do quite a bit of woodworking and woodturning, and have done some aluminum casting. Also, I took a blacksmithing class for my birthday because fire and hitting things with hammers are two of my favorite things.

To metal spin, I fabricated the tool rest and turned the mandresl and follower bloacks, and made or bought various spinning tools to use on my Rikon mini-lathe. I'm getting the feeling that that I made need a proper spinning lathe or at least a beefed up modified wood lathe, preferably a smallish one like a Karle.

So far I have destroyed some pewter, copper, and aluminum discs of various sizes. Totally crushed them. It's a pretty impressive stack of failure sitting on my workbench. I would post a picture but that would be bragging.

Thanks and I look forward to learning.

Hi Ohio welcome to the forum
Peter

Welcome to the forum, Ohio.

your spinning discs were they annealed ? google what it temp for each material. yes I think Your mini lathe on the light side for spinning

The copper, yes. The aluminum (1100-O from Terry Tynan), no. The pewter, no.

I did start getting things to flow and that was pretty neat. I have two different sizes of trim tool and got my trimming technique working, so it was tinsel time. Then I used the bead rolling tool and went right back to Failtown.