Experimental spindle spider.

[Highpower]

Back when I first bought my lathe and had very little tooling for it, I was working on a project that I used quite a bit of drill rod for. This was also before I had a band saw, and I was parting off from 6 foot lengths of stock.
I was just stuffing rags inside of the spindle around the drill rod where it stuck out of the back side of the lathe.

I got quite a surprise when one of the rags had shifted and allowed the stock to go off center. After the rod started whipping around it was only a matter of seconds before I had a 6 foot "L" wrench!

My very next project was making an outboard spider for the lathe.
Go figure...

Some lessons are learned the hard way. But those are the ones you'll never forget I suppose.