u/jmp242

I have a used Mark V. So my first attempts at turning were with a few short pieces of 2x2 lumber I had cut to size with the bandsaw. I mounted it with the spur drive and live center on the tailstock. I was following the manual to start roughing smaller than 2" at speed C. I was using the large shopsmith gouge that came with the Mark V. It worked ok till I hit a knot and then it would stop turning and make a squealing noise until I pulled the gouge away and then it'd spin again. I thought, OK I'm pushing too hard as IDK what I'm doing. This helped sometimes.

The issue I had though was basically at the knots I could not provide enough pressure to really turn that area and not have it stop spinning at least a few times. I guess I kind of expected more torque out of the shopsmith.

I did try and sharpen the chisel a bit on the sanding disk, which didn't really seem to make much difference.

So I guess my questions are

1. Is it a big problem that this happened? - I tried to minimize the time cause I can't imagine it's good for the machine to jam up like that.

2. Is it expected that knots in store lumber just cannot be turned on the shopsmith? Or is my machine no good / need something fixed?

3. Should I use a different chisel here or do something different from using the large gouge to make the square round? Is it something that is solved with technique?

I'm thinking I might try making one of those "tick tok" style "drippy wood" designs where there's 2 contrasting stains or types of wood with flowing sort of "dripps" coming from the top into the bottom, and when I saw someone do it on Youtube, the comments were it'd be much easier to tape 2 equal boards together and do a scroll saw cut of them, and get 2 artistic boards that fit together rather easily.

However, from what I can tell, the scroll saw can only do up to 2", which means probably sub 1" thick boards would be realistic. So I'm wondering if using the Shopsmith Scroll saw wouldn't make sense. I don't currently own one, but I wouldn't buy one if it's very limited. I wonder if looking for the older jigsaw would make more sense, or if I should look for a completely different tool. I'm mostly interested in doing 1" or thicker wood, anything thinner than 1/2" I'd probably just do on my laser.

I'm a new user of a Mark 5 500 I got used. I haven't set it up yet, but have been watching various videos on Youtube of simple starter lathe stuff. Many of the examples that go beyond a rolling pin seem to be things like round boxes and I recently saw a whistle video. Most of these seem simple enough to start - get an adapter, get a chuck that can grab a small piece of wood, install and try it out.

Until they swap the non-rotating tail part for a forstner drill bit to hollow the thing out. Can you somehow mount drill bits stationary on the other end of the shopsmith? It seems like swapping over to somehow clamping the thing for a drill press mode or the like would be fraught with getting it aligned and very slow. But my online searching doesn't seem to be working to get an adapter for the tailstock to drill chuck or whatever.

Am I just missing something?