Monthly Archive for August, 2011

Lathe spindle lock – pt. 3

Published on August 20, 2011 in News, Sharpening and Uncategorized. Closed Tags: .

Sorry about the delayed post. We’re consumed with software polishing at the moment and there’s not much time for anything else.

Metal polishContinuing with the lathe lock, I cut 3″ from a 1/4″ brass rod, grabbed that in a Jacobs chuck, and polished it. I start polishing with sandpaper (grit depends upon existing scratches—usually #220 is good to start) up to #2000, then metal polish. My long-time favorite is Mothers, which leaves a beautiful polish. I then sanded (with #120) the part of the brass to be glued into the handle (to give the glue something to hang on to), mounted the rod on the tailstock in a collet chuck, and glued it in. Mounting the rod instead of just shoving it in by hand insured good alignment—important for the next steps. I also glued a scrap block to the bottom of the handle.

Waste block glued in place.

The scrap block let me stabilize the piece with a live center while I turned off most of the waste from the butt of the handle. After all, the rod I’m holding by is brass, and not very thick. It wouldn’t stand up to a lot of punishment. If I’d omitted the scrap block, I’d have had a small hole in the end of the piece, which would require further turning.

Here you see most of the turning complete. The work exposed more voids, which I again filled with the mixture of padauk wood dust and epoxy. That’s the shiny goop you see on the right end.

The finished product

The finished product

The final step is finishing, and here a problem arose. I wanted to use a CA/BLO finish for durability, and I’d forgotten how much heat that finish generates. As I put the first coat on and it cured, the cone started to open up from the heat! As soon as I heard the first “pop”, I knew what was happening and shut things down. I let that coat of finish cure, sanded it lightly, then did the rest with a spray can of lacquer. I got a shiny, hard  finish with no more heat problems.

Cones are interesting to turn, and they produce fascinating patterns. If you need a small handle, knob, or pen, give them a try.

Lathe Spindle lock — pt. 2

Published on August 6, 2011 in Tool making and Woodturning. Closed Tags: .

Cones have voids

As I turned, I began to appreciate the difference between a cone and solid wood. Cones have voids, where the little seeds fall out. Even with super sharp tools, I couldn’t keep them all in place. They left pits about 3/16″ in diameter, and I wanted to fill them with something.

The cone had a lot of dark red tones, so I thought some padauk dust would be just the ticket. All I needed was a few tablespoons full of nice clean dust. I sure wasn’t going to generate that with sandpaper in any reasonable amount of time. Sterner measures were called for. A bandsaw seemed like the perfect dust generator.

Resawing for dust

I began by completely cleaning my bandsaw. Then I raided the scrap shelves for a bit of padauk that I could resaw to generate the dust. Since I also teach a veneer class, I figured on killing two birds with one stone: get some slices of veneer and a lot of red dust.

Cone covered with padauk dust in epoxy

The idea worked like a charm, and I wound up with red dust only slightly contaminated with specks of other colors. I dumped it into a plastic cup and picked out the detritus with tweezers. Then I mixed part of the dust with 5-minute epoxy to make a stiff paste and forced it into every void I could see on the surface. I kept the rest of the dust in reserve, in case I needed more later.

As I turned, I uncovered a few more voids, so I was glad to have the extra patching material. Even though it looks gloppy and gross in the photo, almost all of it was turned off, leaving just a tight filling in each of the voids.

Cone, ready to accept the tool shaft

Turning a cone is different from turning wood in an important way—the “grain” follows the petals of the cone. In the photo, it runs from the center of the turning outward and to the left at a very shallow angle. That means I had to turn everything from right to left. I could turn both sides of a bead or cove moving in the same direction—something that’s not very successful with solid wood.

Here you see the cone turned and sanded, ready to have the tool shaft inserted. My plan was to polish the tool shaft, accurately glue It in, then turn the project around on the lathe to complete the bottom of the handle.  More on that next time.