Wood Turning

Wood turning was very much a new thing for me to try once I decided to start doing some furniture making. I joined a local (and surprisingly large) wood turning group in the hope of gaining some tips however my work rarely fit in with their meetings and I found that they mostly love bowls.

Bowl making, it appears, is synonimous with wood turners and craft shops, kit shops and teaching resources are testament to this skilled and popular craft. However I decided straight away that bowl making wasn't for me - my main motivation for turning is to build furniture and I was keen to learn how to shape chair legs and the like. While I can appreciate the skill involved in making smooth bowls I can't help thinking that once you have a fruit bowl and salad bowl you are pretty much done. The thought of filling my house with thousands of wooden bowls that I continually turn out in order to keep hiding in my shed wakes me at night in a cold sweat (not to mention the tons of pot pourri that would inevitably find its way into them) so I decided to go it alone. Fortunately the odd YouTube video here and there seems to have taught me the basics well enough.

Like many new turners it started with making honey dippers (which everyone in our entire family got for Christmas) and rattles for the baby on an ancient barely functioning machine that was found on Ebay. The entirely impractical speed system was a NIGHTMARE to change so I lazily and dangerously tended to gaffer tape the tail stock to stop it rattling loose and kept it on the fastest setting whilst preparing to duck should I need to. My initial efforts were quite fun though I decided that before trying to turn furniture legs I'd need to look at obtaining a better machine - taking the edges off a metre long piece of hefty oak at 2500 revs would probably be terrifying! 

some of the dippers

Baby Rattle

The alarming function of the first lathe (and possibly my 'skill') even managed to produce a honey dipper with a squared handle. Confused that the whole point of lathes from the days when old blokes would sit in the forest knocking out chair legs using a sapling tied to a string generally seems to have been to produce round items I decided to take it along to the turning group to get some answers. surprisingly there were none. I had some experienced and even professional turners look at it, pass it around and then ask "how the hell did you do that?" - apparently if I could bottle that skill I could probably sell it. 



Square handled honey dipper

Fast forward about a year (and several thousand honey dippers which are much easier to hide around the house than thousands of bowls) and I upgraded to an Axminster lathe that I saw on sale. Its a cracking machine, sturdy, easy to use and much, much safer - my first major project was an oak hallway table and I managed to knock out four fairly even legs on this machine.

My new toy

I'm now fairly happy with the (very) basics of spindle turning and am ashamed to admit that I will probably be having a go a 'bowl making' in the future - I've found several uses for being able to hollow out a wood blank like the bowl makers do when I've lamps, candle sticks and similar items so having been lucky enough to get a lathe chuck for christmas I will be teaching myself how to use it. I'd like to point out however that I will not be making more than two actual bowls. Ever.

I'll keep you posted as things progress.