Normally the dude on the Hand Tool Restoration channel of YouTube works silently. We get to revel in the work and the sounds of his tools. That said, he has dropped a couple of narrated videos over the course of the years and this one, focusing on the work he does to bring an antique jewelry lathe back to life, is awesome. The lathe is a pretty simple piece, very small and actually meant to be driven with either a foot powered or otherwise motivated belt. As you will see, the piece requires a little more work than you might be expecting to be made perfect again. Hell, at one point there is a bad ass CNC lathe employed to make replacement parts!
The neatest thing about these videos for us is that he’s always got something pretty mechanically interesting. When the device he is working on is coming apart and being reassembled it is fun to kind of look over the ideas that engineers and designers employed with the technology they had 100 years back.
Maybe we’re weird but stuff like this is really fun to watch.
The Surfers top fuel team used a lathe like this in the 60s to make fuel injector nozzles.