Someone made a comment to me recently that inspired this post: He said that "A lathe is a rotary tool looking for an application". Now, we all know that it is highly useful for turning wood and other materials in the traditional sense, but his looking at it like a "moto-tool" rather than strictly as a tool for shaping wood was inspiring.

I was talking with Mike Meredith of Doctor's Woodshop. He makes an excellent line of friction finishes specifically for the lathe. As part of his demonstration, he showed me a pretty slick sanding head he made for his lathe designed to sand rounded parts. It is a pretty simple turned disk with self adhesive hook materialapplied to the face. On this, he can apply a hook and loop sanding disc directly, or a sanding pad, or even a couple of sanding pads on top of which he then adds a hook and loop sanding disc.

This allows him to create a powered sanding pad with exactly the amount of "give" that he wants for the sanding to be done, anything from a rigid sanding pad to a very soft one that will conform to even fairly tightly curved parts. Obviously, the sanding disc being used must be flexible enough to mold to the part along with the built up padding, and we discussed how Abranet sanding discs are ideal for this application.

Now regular readers of this blog will recall that we published a series on building a 10" disc sanding station for your lathe, but Mike's idea went in a different direction. and then I came across an article in the Feb 2014 issue of Woodworker's Journal Magazine featuring an master woodwind maker, Tim Cranmore. The one page article has a photo of Tim sanding a part on what is obviously a shop-built sanding drum powered by his lathe.

I am always struck by the creativity of trades people when they encounter a specific problem that needs a solution. Mike and Tim both pointed me in new ways of looking at the lathe as a power-head as much as a turning tool, reinforcing the "Sandpaper Mash Up" concept that has been discussed in this blog before. So I invite you to share your creative uses of "a rotary tool looking for an application" Share your by commenting here on the blog, on our Facebook page, or on our Twitter feed. -2Sand.com