This was a more recent project. This lathe belonged to my brother’s girlfriend’s family. They were looking to get rid of it, and knew I had a workshop, so they offered it to me. (I accepted it sight unseen, as the description was vague enough that I honestly wasn’t sure if it was for wood or metal – worst case, I didn’t have a wood lathe yet, but you don’t pass up on the chance to get a metalworking lathe for free!)

It turned out to be a pretty basic Craftsman monopole wood lathe from the 80s. Most of the discussion I’ve found about these said that they were okay at best, fine to learn on but not worth spending much money to buy when there were better designs available out there.

It had been stored somewhere damp and had gotten pretty rusty, and the risk seemed low, so I decided to make a project out of it and learn some tool restoration skills. It ran as-is, but leaving tools rusty always felt kind of disrespectful to me.

I started by disassembling it, which took some doing and a lot of PB Blaster (once WD failed). I treated a couple of the little levers with white vinegar before reading that that was bad for the steel and the galvanized coatings, so I switched to evaporust, which I like a lot. You can save the stuff and reuse it, again and again, until it stops working (and even then it’ll work as degreaser).

All the small parts I dunked in a small bucket of evaporust, but the pole I had to wrap in paper towels soaked in evaporust and then with plastic so it wouldn’t dry. This stripped most of the rust but left a blackish crud that I had to scrape away with steel wool.

On metalworking tools, it’s common to protect them by coating them in oil, but I was advised that sawdust and oil aren’t a good mix, that the grease will collect sawdust and form a kind of cement-like crust as it dries. Considering the options I saw on tool repair forums, I chose two different ways to protect the cleaned parts. The little loose levers, bolts, screws, and threaded parts I treated with cold blue (often used to touch up scratches on guns) and on the monopole I used Johnson's paste wax, which is a floor wax that a lot of woodworkers apparently swear by.

The final result was pretty nice, I think. Between the coatings and the furnace keeping the workshop nice and dry, I haven’t seen the rust return.