Turn Your Router Into A Versatile Lathe For Under A Grand
By Chuck Cage
David writes: “I saw Legacy’s Revo at a woodworking show a few months ago. It’s an easy-to-use ornamental mill which turns an ordinary router into a complete workshop. It can be used as a lathe by slowly rotating the workpiece against the spinning router bit, and by locking the workpiece and moving the router you can easily cut decorative flutes in your work. Spiral cuts are simple to make, too, because the router’s movement can be geared to the rotation of the workpiece. A template follower helps reproduce turned parts, like a broken leg from an antique table. There are tons of other great things to do with this mill. The mill itself is inexpensive at only $795, and it’s small enough to be bench mounted.”
Legacy also offers a variety of “kits” for the Revo including a rotary table, a framing kit, a dovetail kit, and a pen mandrel kit (for making pens and pencils). There’s a drive gear upgrade package available to add four additional drive gears “extending the number of pitches that can be milled to 19.”
Legacy’s site also notes that it’s possible to adapt many of the accessories for their “professional model” tools to the ornamental mill as well.
The Revo [Legacy Woodworking]
April 12th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
I saw one of these demoed at the woodworking show and it was really cool!
April 12th, 2007 at 3:06 pm
The concept makes sense, but it still seems like it would be scary to operate.
April 12th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
I wonder how long it would take to set up and how long it would take to learn how.
April 13th, 2007 at 6:08 am
There are plans for a jig that accomplishes many of these same actions–it was in a cheap router book that I have at home. If anyone is super interested, I can dig out the book so you can look it up.
April 13th, 2007 at 6:27 am
nrChris - I’d DEFINITELY be interested. What book is the jig in? Thanks! I saw the Legacy being demoed at a woodworking show a while back and I was very impressed. It looks very cool and can do a lot, from turning spindles to tapers, spirals, and even milling wide, flat stock. It is a great idea, but I simply can’t afford it. The Revo is their economy version but it is $800. Too bad!
April 13th, 2007 at 8:10 am
I would like to see as well
April 16th, 2007 at 11:51 am
No response from nrChris on this yet, but I did find an article at Finewoodworking.com that describes a jig of this sort. I haven’t read the article yet, but it looks interesting:
http://www.taunton.com/finewoodworking/SkillsAndTechniques/SkillsAndTechniquesPDF.aspx?id=2246
Is this the article you were talking about, nrChris?