I am still pondering a duplicator for my Jet Mini. One of my biggest concerns is if burl cork will cut o.k. on it. I am talking mostly about "standard" burl cork, not Andy's exotics, which I have heard cut well.

Thanks,
Marc

I had the Vega duplicator,,, did not do well for the inserts that I bought it for,, ended up selling it on @#$%&,,
just my $0.02 worth..on the duplicator.

The Vega duplicator works well on soft woods and all types of cork (not hardwoods or acrylic type products). You can expect to turn oversize a bit and then go back and smooth the surface with 2 or 3 grades of sandpaper.

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Tom, what problems have you experienced with the Vega duplicator in making reel seat inserts in hardwood? How does this differ from using a metal lathe for the same task? Is the the profile of the Vega tooling, slop in the mechanism, or something else. I've used a friends lathe with a Vega duplicator to turn a number of maple balusters for a project and it worked very well. I took the balusters home and finished them on my Oneway (slight shear scraping, sanding, and finishing) and the results were spot on.

The bit used to make the copies isn't suitable for work in very hard woods, particularly the exotics like Rosewoods and similar. Forget about it for plastics.

I spoke with the folks at Vega about this and they said that they never intended the product to be used with the very hard exotics or with materials other than common North American woods. The scraping action and the bit type just don't lend themselves to certain tasks.

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