Bed Extension for Nova DVR XP (Shop Built)

Well, the $500 sale at Woodcraft for the new Nova DVR XP’s was too good to pass up so I took the plunge and bought one. My buddy Steve A. suggested making a tailstock bed extension vs spending the extra $230 for the factory version. Since I mainly bought the lathe for bowl turning, am only making a limited number of baseball bats and love a challenge I figured, why not.

I started with 2 pieces of 3/8” x 1” x 15” long aluminum bar stock to use as ways, then built a simple chassis with scrap pieces of 3/4” thick oak and 4/4 thick walnut gussets to suport the aluminum bars. Screwed it all together, clamped it with a small C clamp to the lathe and it worked just fine.

The lathe is still on my regular workbench (See my fun bench project), so the end of the extension is hanging off the workbench. When I revved the lathe up to 1100 RPM I started to get a little vibration, so I clamped it to the funbench with some large F stype clamps.

I’m sure the “soon to be built” new lathe table will support both the lathe and the extension with no problem eliminating the shake altogether.

Not bad for basicially a free fixture, only took an hour to build it.

By the way, the DVR is an awesome machine, the only think I don’t like about it are the buttons to switch through the programmed speeds. To do this, you have to hold two buttons at the same time. The are very close to each other and it took some getting used to to manever through the speeds. Otherwsie, this is one very cool tool.

-- Bob A in NJ