Feasability of a Big Lathe?

["John Klassen" <jaklassen2001@zzzzzzzzzzzz>]

Hello everyone,

I spent Sunday afternoon at my father's metal shop building my new carving
bench. It should be able to hold at least 6000lbs safely.  I used .250 wall
steel tubing all flux core welded together.  I have some 3" thick Maple
boards to use as a top.  Hopefully that will do(with a brace welded in the
center).   My old rickety wood bench was starting to get unsafe.

While I was working on the bench my father stopped me to show me a lathe
that he recently acquired.  This thing is BIG.   It is an old metal lathe
used for making the shafts for dam turbines.  It can go to 24feet.  The
chuck on it is approximately 4foot diameter.  My initial reaction was
complete astonishment. Followed by " What the hell would you ever want
anything like that for?"

Now that I've had a few days to think about it I've been wondering about
using it to turn stone columns.  There has been a few threads lately about
stone turning. Noteable contributers in this have been Simon Brown and Bill
Woodard.

It is just a thought right now and the machine is not set up yet.

There are many questions

What is the maximum length to diameter that stone could be turned to?
Where to get the stone precut to those dimensions?
Is there a market for big stone columns?
What would the columns be worth?
Safety?
Who's the competition?
Technically "How to do it?"

I could go on.

My father is willing to put the lathe to this use but it's a big "if".

Needless to say, I was caught of gaurd and didn't have a camera.  I'm hoping
to get my sister to e-mail pictures this week.

Is it feasable?

John