Wood Lathe

This is my home-made wood turning lathe. I made this in my spare time over the course of about a month (8/2/2024 to 10/3/2024), mostly using material I had stored in the workshop. The only things I bought for the initial build were the motor and the variable speed drive that powers the motor (although since completing it, I've bought some chisels, a chuck and various other bits and pieces to go with it).

These are some of the first things I made with the lathe:

These are a set of new handles for my most often used chisels. The handles are made of English Walnut, which might not be the ideal wood for chisel handles, but it's very pretty and I had a block that was fairly short but thick and wide and I couldn't think of anything else I was likely to do with it.

I made a few pens and pencils out of American Black Walnut as a means of practising the techniques, along with a couple of bowls out of Sycamore (the first one is shown above).

I also made a large (about 250 mm diameter and 70 mm thick) bowl out of beech, mainly to test the capabilities of the lathe.

While I was making the lathe, I posted regular updates (with lots of photos) here and on a couple of forums. You can read all the details of the build on the blog page

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