A few weeks ago, fellow owwm'er Allen Hunt bought a lathe sight unseen over Craigslist.  It was described as a jeweler's lathe, and when he went to pick it up, he was dismayed that it was only a foot long and unsuitable for any sort of heavy machinery repair.  Since he had promised to buy the little machine, he went ahead and took the deal anyway.  When he brought it home, I gave him a bit of a hard time about it.  I told him it really wasn't even big enough to qualify as a baby lathe, that it could only be considered a toy lathe.  He laughingly agreed, and I joked that I was going to put a Precious Moment's sticker on it so he could display it on a shelf somewhere.  He thought for weeks about who might actually buy the little machine for the price he had paid and came up with nothing. 
This morning my 7 year old son Logan needed to build a pinewood derby car for cub scouts.  He did all the sanding, painting, and decals on the car body, but the wheels and axles still needed smoothed and polished.  The little lathe immediately came to mind as a machine he could use without any serious danger, and which would be just the right size for the job.  I agreed with Allen that I'd trade him some labor for it, and I took it home.  I gave Logan a quick tutorial on how to chuck the work in the lathe and use progressively finer grit sandpaper to smooth first the shafts, then the wheels.  We did have to replace the belt on the machine, a small rubberband which had seen better days.



Unlike many of the other kids, he did most of this work all by himself.  His finished car looked good, though we had to glue some weights to the top, and some change, to get it to the maximum regulation weight for the race.

Though his car didn't place in the top 3, it did win 2 of 3 of the races it was in.  He had a great time along with the satisfaction of a creation of his own.