Sherwood SCA-900 Lathe Copy Attachment — and What Amazon Has Instead

Sherwood is Timbecon’s machinery brand, sold direct in Australia. A copy attachment like the SCA-900 mounts on the lathe bed and carries a cutter linked to a stylus that traces a template. Push the carriage along and the cutter reproduces the template’s profile in the blank.

There is no equivalent on Amazon. Copy attachments are machinery-dealer items, sold by Timbecon, Carbatec, Record Power dealers and similar, and that is where to buy one if you need it.

When a copier actually pays

The break-even is somewhere around a dozen identical parts. Below that, setup time — mounting the attachment, cutting a template, dialling in the cutter depth — exceeds the time you save.

Above it, the arithmetic reverses hard. Twenty staircase balusters that must match is exactly the job these exist for, and no amount of skill makes hand turning twenty identical spindles as consistent.

The hand method, done properly

For four table legs, this is the faster route and the results are good.

Make a story stick: a piece of scrap the length of the spindle, with every transition marked — the top of the taper, the centre of each bead, the shoulder. Hold it against the blank and pencil the marks across with the lathe turning.

Turn every blank to the same diameter at the marks with a parting tool and calipers set to each critical dimension. Do all four blanks at each stage rather than finishing one and starting the next — it is much easier to match four cuts made in a row than four spindles made an hour apart.

Then shape between the marks. The eye tolerates small variation in a curve; it does not tolerate a bead in the wrong place.

What you need for either approach

Sharp tools with enough handle to control. The Sorby set scored here is the set Amazon reliably stocks, and it covers everything spindle turning asks for. Add a grinding jig, because the method only works if the tools stay sharp through the run.