Lathe Upgrade - Shop Made Lathe Attachment

Nice setup! Getting the mounting for the steady out of the way of the rest looks super helpful.

A couple additional thoughts... this setup also seems extensible in some interesting ways.

This would be pretty easy to adapt to an old fashioned pressure steady like woodturner21 (aka Steve master of the skew) uses here. I haven't used the one-way which I can see 100% provides more support but I know these are super fast for production work, and depending on the piece type can be well into "good enough"

This would be super easy to fab a add a set of duplicating fingers to.. I don't know how you're gauging thickness set points, but these are a bit easier to hit when manually duplicating work than calipers as you can mount the reference piece (original/template) and just set all of the fingers to drop at specific reference points.
(commercial example, but easy to dit: https://turnersworkshop.co.uk/product/duplicating-fingers)

a small modification on the tailstock side might make it possible to make that sliding/adjustable.. that may be vastly over engineering the problem if you're 99% all one or close enough to one length.

If you're doing mostly long stuff that's not to big around (so's you don't need to really move the rest in & out), a long chunk of drill rod epoxied on top of a piece of angle iron makes a dandy tool rest, so a full length custom "banjo/rest" would let you run the whole length without futzing with the rest. I say custom banjo, although I'd probably make it so you could use the original on one end (headstock) and have the other just be a fixed clamp block hard welded/bolted together to the rest itself (a swivel plate that fits sideways between the ways would make it fairly quick to install/remove with a through bolt).

Looking forward to your next installment :)
 
Thanks Ryan. Yeah, I made a 24" tool rest with an epoxied rod. Unfortunately, it's too short. The section in the middle is about 32" long. Not sure if I'm gonna make another one for this project or not. I agree, I don't like the idea of how many times per piece I'm going to have to move the toolrest.
 
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