Possible topics:
Crud on the bushings, Morse Tapers, etc... (Solutions: clean things up)
Poor barrel trimming. (Solutions: Sharpen the trimmer blades, Carbide trimmer blades, trim off bulk of material with saw, reducing to a bare minimum the amount of material the the trimmer must mill, even pressure when trimming, rotate as you go to assure consistency of cut.)
Over-tightening the knurl on a mandrel. (Solutions: eighth to quarter turn past tight, anything more is too much. If that's not enough to hold the piece, something else may be wrong.)
Over or under tightening the tail stock. (Solutions: same as above.)
Dull tools requiring increased lateral pressure on the mandrel. (Solution: sharpen them.)
Doing both barrels at the same time resulting in OOR at the tail stock end. (Solutions: Do one barrel at a time, close the to head stock. Use B mandrel whenever possible. The 8mm mandrel has something like 35% more interior volume of the 7mm mandrel so it take lateral pressure better without bowing. Mandrel-less turning.)
Variegated densities in wood blanks. (Solutions: sharp tools, light consistent cuts at the denser sections.)
Poor quality lathe. (Solutions: Better lathe. I have noticed that many of you have big lathes, designed for bowl turning and such. My first was
this. I have a ways to go before I can say that most of my pens were not made on that lathe. It served quite well, but because of its puny size, I suffered nearly every OOR problem you can have.
My solution was to accept an inevitable amount of imperfection, and to rotate the blank on the mandrel 3 or 4 times during the turn down, to round out the inevitable eccentricities. And save for
a better lathe. When I finally got that, the difference was like night and day.)
Anyone else?
