Here is the piece I cut off and as you can see it's in bad shape. If I had known it was like this on the inside I would've looked elsewhere for a better piece. Oh well, I'll have to deal with it now. At this point, it's time to drill a one inch hole through my work piece.
 

This is called a 'Steady Rest' and it came with my lathe when I bought it. This fastens to the bed of the lathe and aides when turning long work pieces. All you do is adjust the three knobs to open the steady rest to accommodate the size of your work piece.
 

However, as you can see this steady rest isn't going to work for my work piece because I need it to hold something that is six inch diameter. Time to come up with something else.
 

I decided to try drilling with a one inch drill to see how it was going to treat me. I tightened my 4 jaw chuck down extra tight, set my lathe for a slower rpm and started drilling. Turns out this setup worked just fine as I drilled as deep as I could with this drill. But this only got me about 5 1/2" deep and I needed to go much deeper.
 

I'm going to make an extension for a 1/2" drill shank, like the one I'm using here. But it will work on any 1/2" shank drill that is over 3/4" diameter because the material for the extension is 3/4".
 

I turned down one end of my extension to 1/2" so it will fit in my drill chuck. Then I drilled and reamed a .501" diameter hole in the other end. This slightly oversize hole makes it easy to insert a 1/2" shank drill into, making it a slip fit.

Also notice I added two 10-32 setscrews to my extension. And I added two small spots to the shank of my drill so those setscrews will hold the drill much better. This way the setscrews won't dimple the shank of the drill, which would make it harder to hold true for future jobs.
 

This worked out really well and was nice and stable. I drilled my hole through by going half way on each side. Now that I have a one inch hole, I'm going to use that hole to locate on, so lets make another spud to fit it.
 

The smaller end is one inch diameter which will go into my base.
 

I'm setting up to machine a three degree taper here (arrows). The lines that you see on my compound are close but not exact.
 

To make sure that I have exactly three degrees I'm going to some checking. I put two lines that are one inch apart on my 4 jaw chuck. I'm gong to indicate from one line to the other using my compound only.