Office of Steam Forum for Model & Toy Steam Gas & Hot Air Engines

Thanks for the replies, keep em coming.

To clarify a bit. I’m not thinking of going all out on authentic scale detail, like some of the machine shop sets I’ve seen. What I’m hoping to achieve is simply creating something that looks reasonably proportioned.

I tend to work from a clean sheet Of paper, sketch then modify as I build things.
An example is a project im finishing up, a “bank vault bank”. While on the one hand it’s a coin bank with a sorting machine, on the other hand it’s a reasonable 1/6 scale old timey small town bank vault with a combination lock and rack and pinion bolt system relatively faithful to originals, all wood.

That’s kinda the idea with my thinking.  I’m mentally designing a woodworking shop with a lathe, drill press, and potentially a jig saw.  Here’s the catch. I want them all to be usable.  They may not be faithful copies of anything, but need to be plausibly proportioned. None of that 1/12 scale with a 1/4 scale crank kind of thing that blows it. 
So I’m kinda thinking along the 1/6 scale line of relatively large shop machines. A seven foot tall drill press or seven foot long lathe scales to 14 inches, for example.  The question of course is can I design a line shaft and pulley system that gives adequate power to really do this?  Experimenting with loads will have to be done first. I may need to reduce machine sizes or not. Some fakery, such as disguised ball bearings may help.