Central Machinery (Harbor Freight) Wood Lathe - Making a Spindle Handwheel

I noticed folks online talking about these Harbor Freight lathes not coming with a handwheel on the left side of the headstock spindle. They'd mention that the Jet JWL-1236 lathe had an available handwheel that might fit this HF lathe. After more searching, I did find in one case someone took the chance and actually did buy a Jet handwheel to see if it would work on their HF lathe, which it did. That was back when the handwheels were $33 shipped. Today (2023) that same handwheel is somewhere around $90 to $140, if you can find one. That price is out of the realm of most people buying one just to "see if it fits". Fortunately someone did the legwork back when they were cheaper. This first photo is a stock photo of the Jet handwheel that I grabbed off the net.

Notice that the handwheel does not have a hole through the center of it, which is fairly mandatory for knocking out spur centers or dead centers from the Morse Taper spindle.

I decided to try making a handwheel. First thing I needed to know was the thread pitch of the HF spindle. Some people on the net mentioned the threads were a funky 1/2-12 left hand and other people said they were a more normal 1/2-13 left hand. Well that didn't help much, so I cut a piece of wood and crammed it into the spindle, twisting as I went, so I could get a general idea of thread pitch. It came out to be the funky 1/2-12 LH thread pitch. The photo below is showing a measurement of four threads on the piece of wood, which comes to .333 inches for 12 threads per inch.

Armed with that bit of knowledge, it was easy to single-point thread a 1/2-inch rod with the funky 12 left-hand threads per inch on the Smithy 1340 metal lathe.

I wanted a hole through this thing so I could remove MT2 taper attachments from the spindle using the knock-out rod without having to remove the handwheel. The knock-out rod is a bit less than 5/16", so I drilled a 5/16" hole.

I cut the threaded part to length, turned a wood handwheel on the HF wood lathe, then drilled a half-inch hole through it. At some point I might use a piece of steel for the handwheel but I'll use the wood part for a while to see how it works out.

Below shows the finished part. I didn't spend much time getting the handwheel looking nice. I just wanted function at this point. I drilled a small hole down through the wood and into the steel center part, then hammered in a piece of .090" welding rod to secure the wood to the steel.  You can see the hole in the wood at the bottom of the handwheel in the photo. We'll see how that holds up.

Voila, it fits nicely and works well.