When I bought my first lathe I also found an old used steel desk to use as a bench. This worked all right, but doing any operations with cutting oil made a hard to clean mess of the linoleum deck top. When I sold the lathe and bought a "new" 60 or so year old Atlas 12" lathe, I wanted to make a chip pan for the desk top. The out of state dealer was reluctant to sell me a regular lathe bench due to the rather significant shipping charges, so I decided to stick with the desk. The desk drawers are also handy for storing various parts and pieces. The desk also suffered from wobbly legs, but removing them and setting the bottom on a row and a half of cinder blocks solved this. It also raised the desk top to the correct height for more comfortable lathe operation. The desk surface, though, gives quite a large area for a chip pan to cover.

    At first I planed to go to a sheet metal shop and have one made. I could bend one myself, but using only my vise grip sheetmetal tool (about 6" wide) it would have been quite a chore. While I was at an Auto Parts store, I stumbled on a perfect solution. An oil drip pan (Figure 1, picture of a used pan). These are used under older cars to catch any dripping oil and keep it off the garage floor or driveway. They are 25 inches X 36 inches and only cost $7 each. They have a nice raised rolled rim that would be perfect to prevent cutting oneself against. They were wide enough to cover as much of the desk width as I needed, with a little desk surface at the back to store longer stock behind the splash panel. One pan is not long enough to fit completely under the lathe, or cover the whole length of the desk. Two, however were too long. I decided to use two and cut one end off each and splice them together. A major consideration was to make the seam leak proof. I could have gone to a lot of trouble and soldered the pieces, but took the easy way out and used a bead of RTV.

Figure 1

    To splice the pans I cut off the ends by turning the pan upside down and using my bandsaw to cut through the rolled rim. I used sheetmetal shears to finish cutting through the flat bottom. Next I used the tapered shanks of some nail sets to expand the rolled edge (Figure 2), allowing me to slide the two pans together with one rolled edge inside the other. After I used a rubber hammer to tap the two sides together to the proper length (the desk length plus a little to add a drain line in the future), I secured them with a rivet through the angled part of each side of the over lapping rims. I then ran a bead of RTV between the over lapped areas, and another along the cut edge of the top panel. A few weights were placed on top to hold the surfaces together while the RTV set for 24 hours. The white line across the panels in Figure 3, is the RTV bead. At the headstock end there is about an extra foot of pan. This area with its' raised edge is handy for holding odds and ends used while machining a piece, and thus off the lathe bed. The finished chip pan is shown installed in Figure 3.

Figure 2

Figure 3

    After a few weeks use I decided that a removable pan directly under the bed between the lathe feet would be nice, and modified another pan for this purpose. It is shown, installed, in Figure 4. Figure 5 shows the pan itself. The back edge was double folded to eliminate the sharp edge. The semicircular feature at the back is the remains of the stamped in company logo. This pan catches the majority of the chips, and once removed, and dumped, the leftovers are easy to clean from the main pan. In addition the one edge slips under the edge of the headstock end foot and catches any oil that drips from the spindle bearing (normal with this lathe).

Figure 4

Figure 5

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