When you work with a cnc engraving machine for too long, it can be hard to remember that the best lathes are often just as good for some things. If you’re having a hard time figuring out the right inspiration for your projects, pulling out a lathe and playing around on there for awhile is generally a good idea.
There are so many things you can use a lathe for. Different types of lathes cut wood, metal and glass, and you can play around with all different types of metal as well as you can play around with different types of wood. For example, there are watchmaker lathes that are used for precision, and there are metal lathes that function similarly to cnc machines.
CNC stands for computer numerically controlled, and since your body can easily shrug off being hit by most little pieces of wood, but doesn’t handle being hit by little pieces of metal as easily, many metal lathes are computer numerically controlled just due to safety issues.
There are also things like the reducing lathe that is used in coin making. There is a master die and then from there, the lathe reads the original item and the other end of the lathe carves out the duplicate item. There are other types of lathes as well
There are people who spin metal on wood lathes so you can create sheet metal bowls and you can use a template to make things out of them. It is not very common nowadays due to changes in how people make things, but metal spinning is still a bit of a hobby for some people.
Glass turning can be used to make precision optical surfaces. With a glass working lathe, things have to be held over a hot area so that the lathe can cut without shattering the glass. There are a lot of things that lathes can do, and the world of the lathe is much bigger than your high school wood shop class where all you made was a bowl.