Making Elaborate Kindling - Diary of an Inept Woodturner

[Dr.Al]

I've got two SK114 chucks and an assortment of fittings and jaws; they're the mutt's nuts. One of them has the locking mechanism you mention; used for sanding in reverse - many spindles won't need the lock you link to as the grub screws secure it onto the spindle before the thread starts - it might be more common on the M33 thread that most contemporary woodturning lathes have.

I'd wondered whether those grub screws would do the job. On my (home-made) spindle, the grub screws would indeed bear on a section of unthreaded spindle between the register and the thread, so it would probably be okay.

 

[Tangledfeet]

I'd wondered whether those grub screws would do the job. On my (home-made) spindle, the grub screws would indeed bear on a section of unthreaded spindle between the register and the thread, so it would probably be okay.

Frankly, I've seldom found the need to either turn or sand in reverse and I paid extra for the locking option several years ago as they had it listed - looks like it may be more of a standard now?

I'm glad you've been posting about your woodturning exploits as its given me a bit of enthusiasm back! I have so, so much wood to process and turn...

 

[Bobupndown]

Eagerly awaiting condiment grinding updates....

 

[ATGNI]

I have recently inherited a wood lathe and lot of expensive-looking chucks and beautiful long handle chisels. I have been wondering if it is possible to book an appointment in advance at A&E to avoid the queue.

 

[Dr.Al]

Another brief aside from the salt and pepper mills and another entry in the diary of the inept woodturner...

For quite a while (ever since I built my woodturning lathe really), I've been looking for a decent quality and nice looking pencil kit. There is a vast range of pen kits out there, but the selection of pencil kits is a lot more limited, especially if you rule out the gold ones (I prefer the look of a chrome finish). I've tried a few different ones but have never found one I was entirely happy with. When I went to Yandles over the Christmas break I picked up a couple of kits: a so-called "Sienna" kit (which works well, but doesn't look that great) and one called a "Cigar Pencil" kit. I bought a couple of each. I made a Sienna pencil a week or two ago; yesterday I decided to have a go at making the Cigar pencils.

I started by bandsawing up a couple of bits of wood into roughly pencil blank size and then used my 3D-printed pen-drilling jaws to drill the 10 mm hole for the brass insert. The brass inserts got glued in place with araldite and today I decided to turn the two pencils.

The first job was to make some bushes out of 303 stainless steel on the metal lathe (as they're different to any of the ones I've made before). Some pen/pencil kits give the dimensions of the required bushes (hence making it quite easy to make them myself); other kits like this one just tell you an order code to buy a kit, so if you're going to make your own bushes you have to figure it out from the kit. Thankfully it isn't too hard to do so.

The first pencil was going to made out of Panga Panga:

Believe it or not, by the time I took that photo the inept-woodturner effect had already done its job...

The first thing I did was use a roughing gouge to turn the square-section wood into something a bit more cylindrical:

I feel relatively comfortable using a skew chisel for shaping something like this (as there aren't any corners!), so I used that to shape the Panga Panga:

I then used some sandpaper to clean it up. The finish off the skew chisel was good enough that I felt comfortable starting at 180 grit and then using 240 and 320 grit. The paper in the background of this photo is just there as my phone was refusing to focus without it.

With that, all the turning was done; it probably took less than 10 minutes in total, perhaps even less than 5 minutes. I'm generally not that much of a fan of pen/pencil turning: the amount of turning per kit is tiny. There's a bit of bandsawing to prepare the blank (assuming you don't just buy pen blanks), then a quick bit of drilling, some messy epoxying, a long wait and then a few minutes of shaping.

Anyway, those blanks went in the bin (along with the pencil kit). I assembled the kit, pushing the various bits and bobs into the correspondingly-sized ends of the Panga Panga blanks and then fitting everything together. That's when I realised that, when I put the blanks on the mandrel (as shown in the first photo in this post), I put them the wrong way round, with the shorter one on the left and the longer one on the right, instead of the other way round. There really wasn't much I could do about that, hence chucking it in the bin. It was possible (ish) to get the pressed-in parts out of the brass tube, but they got a little marred in the process and besides, the brass tubes were permanently glued in place so I decided to just admit defeat and chuck the lot.

Thankfully, I'd prepared two blanks (with glued-in brass tubes), so I could at least have another go without having to wait for epoxy to cure overnight. The next blank was Knob Thorn:

Again, it got roughed to a circle:

I didn't quite get the shape right with the skew chisel (it was probably due a sharpen but I was being lazy), but it was close enough for sanding:

Sanding started at 120 grit this time (as the shape was a bit lumpy).

I gave it a coat of hard wax oil while it was still on the lathe:

This is the kit I'm using for this pencil...

... and this is what it looks like when you've turned it correctly (I think!) and assembled it:

It's the nicest looking pencil kit I've made thus far and I'll probably order some more kits and make one or two more. However, it's still not ideal. The pencil "lead" extends by rotating the two halves relative to each other but there's very little friction in that movement so the pencil can over-extend or retract when you're writing with it if the pencil twists slightly in your hand. It also only holds a single lead (it's loaded from the tip rather than filling a tube at the rear).

I'll keep looking for a better kit (and before anyone suggests it, no: I'm not going to try making my own kit on the metal lathe!)

In the meantime, I thought I'd (finally, I hear you all cry) get back to the salt and pepper mills. Some new oak and black walnut spindle blanks had come in the post. This time I decided just to turn them from square-section...

... into round with a roughing gouge:

That worked fine and was quite quick, but not much quicker than the bandsaw method and it made a heck of a mess. I think in future if the blanks are this big I'll use the bandsaw: at least it gives a bit of useful kindling as the waste rather than just a pile of shavings all over the floor.

Stopping there would have been fine, but on two of the blanks (one oak, one walnut), I decided to use the opportunity to get a bit more skew practice (albeit still just cylinder turning, which I find okay with the skew):

With that done, I found myself with a load more cylinders that I can (try to) turn into salt and pepper mills (and a heck of a lot of mess):

Tomorrow we've got the "joy" of trying to buy a car for the other half, so I won't have much workshop time, but if it's not too late when we get back from the south-east then I might start drilling some bores out.

 

[Bobupndown]

Tomorrow we've got the "joy" of trying to buy a car for the other half

I do love car shopping, what are you looking at?

 

[Dr.Al]

I do love car shopping, what are you looking at?

It's a Mini Coupe.

 

[Dr.Al]

It was 5pm by the time we got back from the traffic-filled lands of the south-east of England, so I didn't get much workshop time today. I needed a little bit of quiet time though, so I thought I'd go and do a tiny bit. I started by marking the break lines on four of the blanks and using parting blades to turn those marks into grooves, much as I did last time:

There's a spare oak blank there for when I inevitably mess something up; I've got some spare walnut as well (still in square section), but I've also got a walnut mill blank that hasn't actually been messed up yet: the lid has been turned but not the body. The lid isn't as nice as the two I finished a week or two ago, but it'll do if I mess up both the walnut blanks I've got prepped.

For a bit of an experiment, I thought I'd try using some 3D-printed cylindrical jaws. They worked remarkably well, with no hint of slipping even when drilling with a 45 mm Forstner bit:

I drilled the 45 mm pocket, then the 38 mm one and then used a 28 mm one for the peppercorn pocket this time (if you remember, I used 26 mm last time despite the instructions saying 24 or 25 mm). I can't see a reason why 28 would be a problem and a bigger cavity means more pepper storage.

I also used my home-made tool to cut the groove in the base of the mill:

At that point all the driving and plodding through traffic started to hit me and I decided it was time to open a bottle of Brains Dark and relax for a bit.

Iechyd da!

 

[Dr.Al]

This morning I started by drilling out the top end of the base piece:

I then repeated the previous steps on the lower parts of the other three blanks. For the first lid, I started by drilling and grooving...

... and then cut the tenon. It felt a bit precarious cutting the tenon (I couldn't afford to mess up the shoulder as the groove was already fixing the size). Therefore, on the other lids, I cut the tenon first...

... and once I was happy with it I drilled the hole and cut the groove:

That gave me four blanks with the bores and tenons all complete:

You'll notice that the one on the left went a bit awry: that was the sort of thing that happens when I get a catch on the corner when trying to start a facing cut of a shoulder. Thankfully, the blank is about 70 mm diameter at the moment and it's going to be reduced to 43 mm in that area, so all that shabbiness will get turned away.

Once again I used my little dimension gauges (see an earlier post in this thread) to pick a few points for key dimensions and then I could use calipers and parting tool to bring those points down to about the right diameter:

I used a spindle gouge to rough out the intermediate bits (I thought I'd got a photo of that stage but apparently not; however, you'll see one later in this post that gives the idea). I then used my "inept woodturner's saviour" tool to refine the shape:

Finally, the lid was sanded:

From that photo you can see some imperfections near the chuck. I sorted them out by moving the part out slightly from the chuck and doing a little more sanding. Ideally, the black acetal bush that holds the part would be less than the diameter of the part (to give access to the corner); I might make a new one if I can be bothered.

As I've now got two chucks, it's quite quick to have one set up with the O'Donnell jaws (and the acetal insert) and the other set up with my custom crushgrind internal-gripping jaws, so I decided to get on with the body rather than doing all the lids first. The body got mounted in the same was as before and pencil lines marked using the gauge as before:

The parting tool then did it's thing:

I mentioned before that I'd missed a photo of the stage after roughing it down with a spindle gouge. This is that stage on the body:

The "inept woodturner's saviour" got it to this stage quite easily:

It was sanded through the various grits to this stage:

The final job was to do a trial fit with the lid:

That showed it being a slightly tight fit, so while the body was still in the chuck I used some 320 grit sandpaper on the inside of the body to loosen it up ever so slightly. I've erred on the side of caution there; I can always remount it and give it another touch of sanding later if required.

At that point, my head was telling me to stop. I tend to wear a JSP Powercap air fed mask when I'm using the lathe. While it's infinitely better than the Trend Airshield Pro thing I bought first (and returned when I realised it didn't seal to my face and the optional-extra ear defenders sat away from my ears and did nothing: it seems Trend assume everyone has a perfectly spherical head), the noise of the fan running next to my head does tend to get to me after a while and there's only so long I can keep going without needing a decent break.

I'm not sure whether I'll get any workshop time before next weekend, but I'm pleased with how it went today. The shaping of the body went entirely according to plan; if I can repeat that success with the other three mills then I'll be very happy and will be able to call this project done.

 

[Dr.Al]

My M33 tailstock live arbor arrived during the week, so I decided to try turning the next peppermill body using chuck support on both ends, using these jaws:

Here it is mounted with the chucks supporting each end:

The disadvantage of mounting it this way is that I have to use a short rest as the longer one would interfere with the chuck at the tailstock end. Nevertheless, it worked okay.

For roughing this one out, I started with the calipers and parting tool as before, then roughed the left-hand half down using the parting tool rather than switching to the spindle gouge. After doing that half though, I got fed up with getting showered in wood chips so I switched to the spindle gouge, which makes it easier to direct the shavings sideways. Once again, I used the inept woodturner's saviour (external shear scraper) to finesse the shape...

... and then sandpaper to smooth it out.

After sanding, I did a test fit of the lid and saw that I'd made the body a bit big for this lid (I think the lid is smaller than the other ones I've made)...

... so a little tweaking was required; better now:

For the last two mills, I went back to the previous method of tailstock support so that I could use the longer rest:

With that all done, I've got four more mills that are looking okay:

They've had a first coat of oil; after the second one has gone on tomorrow, I'll insert the mechanisms and try them out.

With all those mills done, I decided I'd reached my woodturning limit. I don't enjoy it anywhere near as much as other types of woodwork and there's only so much of it I can do before I get fed up with it. I've now hung the lathe back up and I spent the latter part of the afternoon sweeping up and putting stuff away and for the first time in ages I've got a clear main bench and clear portable workbench. The metalwork bench still has some clutter on it, but I can live with that for now. I simply don't have enough space any more to put everything away so it's pretty rare that both the metalwork and woodwork benches are clear.

 

[selectedgrub]

Beautiful

 

[Dr.Al]

Thanks grub

 

[redlig]

Just spotted this thread . my early efforts in dust manufacturing on my non woodworking lathe and using old wood chisel ,and it shows . I had a pair of S&P grinders made by a friend and got fed up with the fallout all over the worksurfaces so " turned up" a couple of anti fall out bases . No more bits . Gentle push fit .

 

[MattF]

There's a spare oak blank there for when I inevitably mess something up

Positive thinking. That's the way.

 

[Dr.Al]

A slightly delayed post as I hadn't got round to taking the last photo, but I've now finished all but one of the mills (and I'm not sure I can be bothered with yet another attempt in order to complete the set, so I think I'll leave it here for now).

After having a couple of coats of hard wax oil, the mills were ready for assembly with their mechanisms:

I used one of my home-made bar clamps to squeeze the mechanism into place. I used a lid (without it's mechanism fitted yet) to give the shaft somewhere to go and a bit of leather to make sure I didn't mark the lid. As before, a 3D-printed ring was used to press on the bottom of the mechanism:

That all went fairly smoothly, apart from on one of the oak mills, where the body cracked:

I'd already cleared the lathe away and couldn't face the idea of another go, so I'm going to leave it at 5 mills. My primary aim was to make a second set to be used as a birthday present for a friend. I'd wondered about a third set as a birthday present for someone else, but we've got other things as gifts anyway and this was only going to be a possible extra. I'll keep the extra walnut peppermill as a spare and if I ever get another bout of woodturning enthusiasm, I might make another oak one to go with it.

For now though, I'm calling this project done, with two salt mills and three peppermills:

 

[Mick Annick]

A slightly delayed post as I hadn't got round to taking the last photo, but I've now finished all but one of the mills (and I'm not sure I can be bothered with yet another attempt in order to complete the set, so I think I'll leave it here for now).

After having a couple of coats of hard wax oil, the mills were ready for assembly with their mechanisms:

I used one of my home-made bar clamps to squeeze the mechanism into place. I used a lid (without it's mechanism fitted yet) to give the shaft somewhere to go and a bit of leather to make sure I didn't mark the lid. As before, a 3D-printed ring was used to press on the bottom of the mechanism:

That all went fairly smoothly, apart from on one of the oak mills, where the body cracked:

I'd already cleared the lathe away and couldn't face the idea of another go, so I'm going to leave it at 5 mills. My primary aim was to make a second set to be used as a birthday present for a friend. I'd wondered about a third set as a birthday present for someone else, but we've got other things as gifts anyway and this was only going to be a possible extra. I'll keep the extra walnut peppermill as a spare and if I ever get another bout of woodturning enthusiasm, I might make another oak one to go with it.

For now though, I'm calling this project done, with two salt mills and three peppermills:

Glue it up and clamp it?

 

[Dr.Al]

Glue it up and clamp it?

I wondered about it, but I'm not convinced I'd be able to close the gap now the mechanism is in place (they don't come back out). Might be worth a try though: nothing to lose and all that.

 

[cocker]

I wondered about it, but I'm not convinced I'd be able to close the gap now the mechanism is in place (they don't come back out). Might be worth a try though: nothing to lose and all that.

Fill the gap with milliput , back in the lathe , quick lick , sand and polish . Contrasting colour and call it character !