He uses a piece of glass on plywood, with a ground file for a scraper. He's only scraping aluminum. I don't think Gingery wrote these books as a way to demonst

He uses a piece of glass on plywood, with a ground file for a scraper. He's only scraping aluminum. I don't think Gingery wrote these books as a way to demonstrate bootstrapping. When Gingery wrote these books there were no Chinese machines available, and hobby lathes (say the Southbend 9" or the myford 7") were way out of reach for a lot of people. He wrote the books to let people get to a machine with what they had. Everyone would be able to find a piece of glass and a file. I built this lathe, but with much heavier sections and out of ZA12 rather than aluminum. I did a pretty good job, I think, but it is still inferior in every way to a Chinese 7x12. Zero regrets that I did it though, even with those better machines available.