(Adan) Yesterday afternoon saw Ian and me hoisting his new lathe up onto a brand new stand we had just fabricated for it.  Check it out, it's quite glam:
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As glam, that is, as a stand can be when it is constructed out of a sawhorse and a 2x12!  It was pretty wobbly after those initial two elements were joined, so we added the sheet of plywood you see at the bottom.  That stiffened it up considerably.  After a couple of sticks braced the baseplate down to the feet of the horse, it was like a rock.  Sort of.  Close enough, we said, and we started making some chips.
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This is a "bowl" of sorts, I guess?  We took turns reducing a large chunk of holly down to this size.  We also tried gouging out its interior just a bit:
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Pretty cool, huh?  It will probably never be a completed bowl, unfortunately, but you never know.  It was great fun as a practice piece.
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This was my first piece.  What can I say, Jennifer and I just saw Inception... what else was I going to make??  We don't have a chuck or faceplate that fits this lathe yet (on order, coming soon, don't worry), so getting this down to a point was a bit tricky.
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It was a lot of fun.  We don't, as a company, have a lot of need for turned parts quite yet... but we got so much entertainment out of making these little guys, we may need to invent some axisymmetric parts, post haste.  Now we just need to make sure we don't get used to that "stand" and leave it there forever. Temporary, it's only meant to be temporary.