I have thought long and hard about building an ornamental lathe. I don't think it would be easy to build, or would have as much adjustability built into it as say the legacy, but the concept is fairly straight forward. With as many engineers as we have on this site, I am sure someone could figure out the gearing and such. Basically, it's very similar to building a router lathe which is just a hand crank on a mounting system for the workpiece, with a router above it attached to some kind of a carriage. with the mill, you have a screw mechanism on the carriage that is geared in with the crank so as the workpiece turns, the carriage slides (X axis)allowing you to turn spirals and such. if you added to this carriage some left to right movement (y axis), say on a sled, you could also do fluting for square or round pieces, and if you made it so that one or both of the ends of the workpiece could be lowered or raised (Z axis), you could do tapers as well. in concept, it's not terribly difficult, but would require some careful planning/drawing. Just my .02