Salt & Pepper Mills Build Process
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Posted 8th March 2025
Turning Elaborate Kindling - Diary of an Inept Woodturner
About a year ago, I made myself a woodturning lathe. Being able to make a woodturning lathe does not make one a good wood turner! Over the last week of so I've been producing a lot of scrap, most of which is in the form of small chips, which are largely useless. However it has also produced some slightly larger pieces that can potentially be used for kindling.
I've been experimenting with various techniques as I've been turning and also been using some home-made tools (not just the lathe), which I always find very satisfying (even when the end result goes in the bin!)
I recently finished making a Heat Treatment Oven and one of the first things I made with it was this:
For those of you who haven't been following along, it's intended for use for cutting grooves for securing a crushgrind mechanism into a turned body. It probably won't surprise anyone that the next thing I wanted to turn was some salt & pepper mills. My aim is/was to make three sets: one set for us and two sets for gifts for some people I think will appreciate them.
I started with a fairly healthy (but not healthy enough, it turns out) supply of 75 mm square Oak and American Black Walnut. These are arguable a bit big (the intended largest diameter of the mills is around 60 mm). It probably would have been sensible to resaw them down to something closer to 60 mm, but I don't trust my turning skills so I thought I'd leave them bigger for as long as I could manage. However, as they're fairly large, I thought it would be a good idea to chop the corners of the square sections off so that I was turning octagons down to circles rather than squares down to circles. The cut-off corners make good kindling!
My bandsaw has a tilting table to allow cutting angles other than 90° to the table. However, I'm generally too lazy to muck about with the table angle, so I went with a different way of cutting the corners off. The angle isn't really critical and it doesn't matter if there's a lot of break-out at the end of the cut, so lazy methods are fine I think!
I start by grabbing a couple of fairly big v-blocks and plonking them down on the table:
It's fairly important that the bar having its corners removed is a lot bigger than the v-blocks, but I've got quite a few of different sizes, so that's easy enough. The bar gets mounted on the v-blocks and pushed up against the fence and then the first corner can be chopped off:
The second corner is done with the first chopped-off corner lying flat on the table...
... and the last two corners are then straightforward. I could then cut the bars into 300 mm lengths and mount them (one at a time, obviously) between centres on the lathe:
A roughing gouge was used to get them round-ish (this photo flatters the finish!):
After lots of work covering myself in little bits of wood, I had quite a decent collection of oak and walnut cylinders:
It's probably worth noting that I'd already tried (and wrecked) three attempts at mills before making all these cylinders. The last of those three wasn't quite as bad as the other two: it vaguely looked like a pepper mill (rather than disintegrating on the lathe) and that gave me enough confidence to finalise what I wanted them to look like and then to start bulk production.
With all the cylinders made, I picked six of them (in the optimistic hope that I wouldn't mess any of them up) and, after remounting each one on the lathe, I drew three lines...
... and then used two different parting tools (seen at the bottom of the photo) to cut deep grooves on the lines:
I took the opportunity to label each of the blanks A, B or C so I wouldn't lose the pairing between base and lid:
I needed to split the blanks into four pieces (of which two are scrap) but with the limited space in my workshop and the bench occupied by the woodturning lathe, the easiest way I could think of to split the blanks was to clamp a bit of scrap to the end of the lathe to act as a bench hook:
A little bit of sawing later and I had a set of blanks ready for turning:
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