Turning Wood on a Metal Lathe 

How much wood would a metal chuck chuck if a metal chuck would chuck wood? lol. thanks for giving some tips for metal turners that want to experiment with some wood

Excellent for making long and exact cylinder-shaped bars. You can't do it with such a precision on a wood lathe.

I like the massive cuts you can take in timber I do quite a lot of wood turning in my lathe up to 26 inch.in diameter

Thanks for sharing! I was hoping to see you using HSS or Aluminum cutting tools. Just wanted to see a result from a metal lathe. So yeah, I bet if you try an Aluminum cutting insert, you will slap you forehead over the difference in cut. Carbide inserts are not considered sharp. They work with force and speed to do cutting on steel. Manually sharpen a high speed steel insert or get the Alu once and it will do even better!

You'd probably want to use a cutting bit that's got a really really positive rake and steep relief (i.e. stupid sharp) to get a much smoother finish. You couldn't use it for metal work because it would be too fine and thus fragile, but for even the hardest of woods, a high speed steel cutter with a 3-5 degree angle won't snap. I don't even own a lathe though, just a loser who watches too many videos, so disregard everything i just said.

Seems like cleaning up all the wood chips would be a pain in the butt. A wood lathe does not have the feed mechanism and other moving parts that wood chips or dust could interfere with. But for the occasional simple turning like making a handle it seems to work OK if as you said you run your vacuum to grab as much dust and chips as possible as you're turning.

love the lathe very similar to mine!

Why old machinists tells that you need to cover guides of lathe when doing this? Wood is much softer and should not damage guides, IMHO.

Metal turning on a wood lathe very common