Getting wood to turn on you lathe can be a challenge. However the off cuts from a building site have great potential as practice turning blanks. Off cuts of commercial 2 x4s make good turning blanks for beginners. The wood is usually fir, spruce, or pine. These are soft woods rather than hard woods. The …
Wood Trivet – A kitchen turning project
Turning a wood kitchen trivet is a great project to practice your bowl turning skills. You make the face of the trivet flat and shape the profile of the edge to suit your project. The end result is a wooden trivet you can be proud of. Kitchen trivets are used to protect surfaces from pots …
Cup Holder Extension
Turning a cup holder extension I have an awesome coffee cup. It keeps the coffee hot for a long time. But it does not fit into the cup holder in my car. In order to solve the problem of not being able to use an extra-large coffee cup in my car’s cup holder, I had …
Woodturning Shop Notes
Shop notes are an often neglected tool of the woodturner. Planning your project helps you avoid mistakes and reduces your turning time. Keeping shop notes is easy with this template. Add them to your toolbox today. I can recall several occasions where I had turned a wonderful project. One was a seed pot maker and …
Turn a Mexican Train Dominoes Hub Even If You Are a Beginner
Turn a Mexican Train Dominoes hub and make dominoes more fun. This wood turned domino train station is a little challenging because it involves some refinement after the lathe. You’ll need some face-plate turning experience for this project, but it’s suitable for the advanced beginner. I played dominoes when I was a child. I don’t …
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Turned Wooden Christmas Bell
Bells are a traditional Christmas ornament. They are part of the Christmas narrative. Jingle bells, sleigh bells, silver bells, I think you get the idea. A turned wooden Christmas bell will be a lovely ornament on the tree. A bell shape is fairly straight forward and a quick search through my Pinterest board, featurning 100+ …
9 Shop Safety Tips for Woodturners
Wood turning involves spinning wood and sharp tools. Spinning wood can lead to dangers and injury. But following some simple shop safety tips you can avoid common injuries associated with wood turning. Let’s start by looking at your woodturner shop. Did you notice that I said “your shop” and not mine? There’s a reason for …
Parting Tool – More versatile than you thought
The parting tool is one of the first tools that most turners get with their lathe. The obvious purpose is to help you “part” the turning off of the lathe. However the tool is much more useful than just getting the wood off of the lathe. So let’s take a look at two different parting …
How to secure wood to your lathe
In order to turn wood on a lathe you have to secure the wood to the lathe. For spindle turning the wood is held between the head stock and the tail stock. For bowl turning I will show you how to mount a bowl blank with a face plate. These two methods lets the lathe …
