Robert Sorby Modular Tool Rest System Review
Stem posts and cross bars you buy separately and combine. Fix the one thing that ruins more turning than blunt tools: a bad rest.
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The tool rest is the part of a lathe nobody upgrades and everybody should. The gouge slides along it constantly, and every catch and every dropped tool leaves a nick in the top edge. Those nicks then telegraph into the cut — the tool jumps a fraction as it crosses one, and the surface gets a ripple you will sand out later and blame on technique.
Cast iron rests, which is what most lathes ship with, ding easily. A hardened steel bar does not.
How the system works
Sorby’s Modular Tool Rest System splits the rest into two parts. A stem post drops into your lathe’s banjo. A cross bar clamps into the post. Both are sold separately, in several lengths and diameters.
That means one post covers a 9 in straight bar for general work, a longer bar for spindles, and an internal bar — a cranked shape that reaches down into a bowl or hollow form to support the tool where a straight rest cannot follow.
For anyone hollowing, the internal bar is the reason to buy the system at all.
Order the right post
This is the failure mode with modular systems. Lathe banjos are bored 1 in, 3/4 in, 25 mm and occasionally other sizes, and a post that is a millimetre out is useless.
Measure your banjo bore before ordering — not the post on your existing rest, the hole it sits in — and buy the post to match. Sorby publish the sizes clearly; the mistake is assuming.
Where it is not worth it
If you turn spindles on a small lathe, the rest that came with the machine, dressed occasionally with a file and a bit of wax, does the job. Dress it flat, break the top edge slightly so the tool slides, and it will be fine.
The modular system earns its money when you need reach, when you need more than one shape of rest, or when you have simply worn out the original.
What works
- Hardened steel cross bars do not take the dings that a cast rest does, and a dinged rest is what makes a gouge stutter mid-cut
- Buying the stem post to suit your lathe and the cross bars to suit the job means one system covers a straight rest, a long rest and an internal rest
- The internal cross bar reaches inside a bowl or hollow form where a standard rest physically cannot go
What doesn't
- Everything is sold separately — the post, each cross bar, and the right diameter for your banjo — so the real cost is several times a single listing
- You must know your lathe's banjo bore (1 in, 3/4 in, 25 mm are all common) before ordering, and getting it wrong means a part that will not fit
- For a small lathe doing spindle work, the rest that came with the machine is usually adequate and this is overkill