Turning a stool

Well week 5 has come and gone , luckily for me I was the only one in the class this week. I have finished the milking stool a nice little three-legged stool with legs that are way fancier than they need to be .

The new things that I learnt about this was drilling the holes in the seat and then turning the legs to fit the drilled holes. I was expecting to use a drill press to make the holes for the legs to fit. The whole process took place on the lathe, a chuck was installed into the headstock with a 19mm forstner bit. A jig was then attached to the tail stock which presented the stool seat at 10° to the drill bit.  The seat rested on two rollers which made rotating it after each hole was drilled very easy indeed.

A combined picture showing the stool form two angels
Two views of the finished stool

Hammer in the Morning

An attempt at a Carver's Mallett

The great thing about having trees is that you can cut them down for woodworking projects. That’s perhaps an exaggeration. The log in the attached picture  was salvaged from a Pencil Pine that died. The log has been kicking around for  few months and I thought that I might turn some of it in to something. No pun intended!

Having seen one of these in a woodworking magazine it seemed easy enough. The pencil pine is fragrant so it made the job quite pleasant. Not too bad for a first effort. The wood itself isn’t that good there are some splits or shakes. The handle’s style  was modelled on an old chisel handle that from the shed. It feels nice to hold so that is a testament to the old handle design. I did make it slightly larger in diameter so it’s not a dainty handle.

Although the wood was still a little green I did sand it with three grits and finish it with a scourer pad. I may oil it at a later date.   Anyway the mallet is resting on what it came from.

Woodturning Continued……

Now at week four of the course, I missed an entry for week three. So far I have turned beads and coves and made a random chair leg. I have surprised myself with the speed that I have taken this on. I am now in the middle of making a three-legged stool, turning the legs and seat (see image below). This has introduced some new skills to the world of turning wood. Notably I have sanded and polished the bits and pieces. This has also inspired me to actually make something from a small tree that I cut down some months ago. Now if I could actually figure out how to load pictures. I seem to be having a brain freeze on this subject today.I have moved the photos to Flickr but that didn’t work so I edited the photos and made them smaller. This seems to be something of a bugbear this evening the whole uploading a photo thing.

Legs and Seat

More Woodturning Lessons

Second lesson and all goes well. Am now mastering the spindle gouge making coves and beads. Whilst the results are pleasing they are really only “designer firewood”. The really good thing is that I can replicate the work at home. Next week I start work on a chair leg!

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Wood-turning Lessons

I have just completed my first formal wood-turning lesson. Having bought a lathe last year I thought that it would be appropriate to take some lessons. I can’t  believe the setup include four lathes and one instructor, nearly personalized  tuition.   So I spent three blissful hours make square pieces of timber round with a roughing gouge and a skew chisel. I then moved on to making beads and coves. This introduced the parting tool and spindle gouge. Off to a flying start and another nine weeks to go

Finally Got The Lathe up and Running

Well after years of  of procrastination I have finally bought a lathe and managed to get it set up. A mini late a Woodfast M305 Mini Lath

Snapped a couple of pics with the ole iPhone. The stand is great it is solid and puts the lathe at a comfortable working height. The lathe was almost completely assembled it only requiring a small tool frame, and fitting the the tool rest. I took the opportunity to apply Silver Glide to the exposed cast iron parts.  Without too much trouble I turned a small piece of timber.

The lathe is easy to use and and should giver years of trouble free service. The lathe comes with a live centre a 82mm  face plate and spur centre. A set of tools from Carbatec and I’m off turning wood into shavings.

Woodfast Mini
Woodfast Mini Lathe
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A tale from a parallell universe

This sad tale of the triton users groups reminds me of another simialr experince that I had. Remeber the old computer user groups in the days when there were several compting operating sytems in the market place. Windows was only a dream. I belonged to an Atari user group , they had a GUI long before microsoft. I was a bid nerdy but 512 kilobytes of ram was something to behold. But with the arrival of the 2400 baud modem and bulleting boards things began to change. The once flourishng Atari User group drifted away as we all became seduced by Microsoft.

A tale from a parallell universe