Craftsman 109 Lathe Mounting Base

I dug around in the wood pile in the basement and found a piece of 3/4" plywood that I was able to cut a section from to make a base for the lathe and motor. I mounted the motor on a hinge so it was adjustable for the different pulley diameters.

The below photo shows the large hinge.

I initially just let the weight of the motor keep tension on the v-belt, but decided that might be too much tension so I put an adjustable stop bolt under the motor to carry the weight. It is adjustable. (Later I put a second bolt to share the load.)

For small projects, this lathe will work well.

The lathe only came with the five change-gears that were installed (in addition to the five permanently-installed gears, in case you're wondering why you see more than five gears in the photo below). They are one each of 20-, 24- and 48-tooth gears, and two 64-tooth gears. According to the chart, the configuration the gears are in now gives the finest feed rate possible, which is .0024" of travel for every revolution of the spindle. Rearranging the gears would give me one other feed rate of .0048" per revolution.

With this set of gears, the only threads I can cut are 16 and 32 threads per inch. It's no big deal though, as I would never attempt to cut threads on this little guy.

Update 8/4/2021: I added a tension bolt and nut between the lathe base and the motor mount. Now I can tighten the nut to hold the motor platform tightly against the two bolt "feet" on the bottom side of the motor platform.