Tuesday, November 9, 2010

Making new tools for the wood lathe part 5 Finishing the handles and mounting the blades

Once the first handle is finished I cut it free from the stock and re center the tailstock on the remaining blank.
I will now refine the handle shape except for the part in the jaws and fit the ferrule.
p.s. The tool mark BEDAN is actually a bead scraper - my bad . A bedan only has one side sharpened.
handle 8
Once the ferrule is fitted, I wrap electrical tape around it about 4 times and remount the handle the other way around to finish the back end. I generally use a small skew to sneak up on the tail stock point then finish the remaining coat of lacquer over the entire handle. I use lacquer becausee it seems the most durable for this stuff and doesn't warm up in use and get sticky.
handle-9
handle-10
I will let everything dry for 24 hours then fit the shank of the tool on by placing the blade in my vise and tapping the handle home with a rubber mallet.
Here are the two tools finished except for some epoxy resin in the spacing left from drilling the handles.
handle10
As the need presents I will quite often make up a tool in a hurry promising myself to remake it "cosmetically" in the future but that never seems to happen.

Here's a few that I have made for various tasks:
handle-11
The top two are the ones just made and the others are scrapers and similar.
The bottom one is a file contoured to produce a continous shape on a bowl I was developing.
The one with the round shaft in the middle I used for cutting an ironwood box. I brazed on a carbide tip on that one.
Just to finish this segment, I grabbed a piece of Manitoba Maple (Box elder), fresh cut and mounted it on the lathe to try the skew/gouge.
handle-12
Mountains of long curly ribbons of beautiful smelling wood shavings.
*I love turning this wood green!*
Next I grabbed the new skew gouge and it works well to make continous beads with the advantage of being able to top the beads with the same tool.
I must try it on dry wood to see how it planes the surface.
It wanted to take too much off on this wet stuff.
My bead technique needs some practice as the beads I made in my excitment look more like mushrooms!
handle-13

No comments: