While turning some of the LAYZOR parts on my lathe, I saw chips flying all around my shop. Cleaning the mess gets very old very quickly, so I decided to address it sooner rather than later. My lathe didn’t come with a spindle guard (and commercial ones get very expensive) so I had to come up with something on my own. Luckily, I had a 5mm acrylic leftover piece which was perfect for the job. A nice bonus is obviously the improved safety against flying metal (and flying chuck keys! ;-)).
I weighed my options and decided to not make things harder than needed. I dug up the old acrylic line bender and made a bend that matched the profile of my machine’s motor housing.
Everything about this project was very spur-of-the-moment. No drawings, no prior measurements. Just make and adapt by eyeballing and testfitting. I used some scrap pine as a standoff in order to give myself a bit more space around the spindle.
Up to this point I still had no idea about how I would attach the guard to the machine itself. Obviously I needed some kind of hinge so I could get the guard out of the way.
I ended up using a leftover block of aluminium with a steel axle rod inserted in the side.
Attaching the axle block to the motor housing was easy since there were very convenient threaded holes already present.
All in all a nice improvement and not that much trouble!