Woodturning - How I got started

I first began woodturning in about 2002 and I've found it to be an extremely therapeutic hobby - I recommend people to try it. My normal job is very stressful, as anybody involved in running a small start-up business in the current economic climate will know. Getting away from the stresses of long hours and back to the simplicity of making objects from the local timber is incredible (and I don't do enough)!

In this Hub, I'll describe a bit on my lathe and basic woodturning tools: chucks; gouges; scrapers and chisels. The photos illustrate some of my earlier pieces and, I hope, progress!

I hope you find my experiences interesting - some things I'd do differently, but it's "turned out" OK!

My lathe is an old friend, it's a Myford ML8 (click here for more information & original images from Myford's ML8 Manual) and has had a long life. I think it's from the early 1950's but I'm not too sure. All I know is that it was used in my old school (before I went there) and that my Father bought it from them in the early seventies and taught himself how to use it before giving it to me in 2002 when he decided, aged 80+ he wanted a new challenge and began painting landscapes.

The Myford lathe came with several face-plates for bowl-making. The wood had to be screwed on to the plate which meant care had to be taken when hollowing out the bowl or plate not to go too deep - the sound of a hard metal screw-tip hitting a nicely sharpened gouge isn't great! I bought it a Nova G3 chuck (shown in the photo) which has been fantastic.

Next came siting the lathe and building a stand. I built this out of solid baulks of timber and anchored them solidly to the floor and two walls of my shed. When I do this again, I'll do it even more solidly, an alarming amount of shaking can happen when your "roughing out" a job from an uneven bit of tree-trunk!

Adjusting the speed of the lathe is not automatic as on modern lathes. It's done by raising the electric motor to take the tension off the belt and selecting the pulley wheels you think you want, then release the motor back down again - I've only trapped a finger once!

Dad also gave me his old woodturning chisels, gouges and home-made scrapers. It soon became obvious to me that they'd had a hard life and I needed to upgrade!

After deciding new tools were needed, I went to a local stockist of all things relating to turning and asked their advice about a good starting set of tools. He recommended those made by Robert Sorby and I got a set of 6, consisting of a range of gouges, scrapers, parting tools and a skew-chisel for work "between centres", that is along the bed of the lathe and the endstop. This would normally be for items such as lampstands, rolling pins etc.

I also needed to be able to sharpen them and so I got hold of a grinding wheel and tool-rest, with this setup, you can easily adjust the cutting angles of your chisels. Because mine is water-cooled and rotates slowly, you can't undo the tempering of the steel. Learning to sharpen tools is probably best done by taking an evening class - I didn't do this!

I enjoy using locally-sourced Scottish timber such as yew; laburnum; ash and cherry. I'm lucky to have a good local timber merchant with a wide range of different timber. Also, living out in the country, I've had a few trees blow down and had great fun turning freshly sawn ash and sycamore. This "green turning" is what the woodturners (or "Bodgers") would have done on the old treadle-lathes out in the woods of Britain when they produced items from chairs to all items of kitchen-ware.

The photos show some of my work with the earliest first. I love to leave on the bark of the tree if I can and the warmth and variety of laburnum and yew are an endless source of pleasure.

The sycamore bowl is shown before it was finished completely, but roughed out and left to dry it began to twist and bend in entirely unpredictable ways.

All of my work is finished very simply, I use a range of abrasive paper, starting coarsest and working down to a very fine grit. Then I use natural oils finished off with 100% beeswax or a good furniture polish that contains beeswax.