So I've been making wands. Loads of the little buggers. I've been taking pictures when I remember, but you know how I am. Anyway, I figured I'd run through a couple lathe-related things with you all. Hopefully you don't mind.
Remember these?
Good. That's where we start.
Next, look at this:
That's a bit of wood. A little over a foot long, squarish, maybe 3/4" x 3/4". I ripped a 1x2 down the middle to get it, so there you go.
This is a handy tool for finding the center of anything square or round. Awesome piece of equipment, this. Otherwise finding the center takes for freaking ever.
This is my new spur center. Isn't it pretty? It's a much smaller diameter than the last one, and the spike in the middle is spring loaded, so you damage less wood when mounting it into the lathe. That's awesome. This is what has allowed me to start turning things that are smaller than 1.25" in diameter. That's also awesome. It means wands come out faster, everything is cheaper, etc. All good things. So anyway, you mark the center on each end of the wood, put the spikes on the centers and crank it all down. Once you have a lathe you'll figure that out, and I can't really do the process justice in text.
See the little teeth biting into the wood? That's what we want.
Now, you have to knock the corners off to turn your squarish piece of wood into a roundish piece of wood, right?
This is how it starts. You basically knock the corners off. I usually use my roughing gouge for this.
Then, if you're me, you forget to take pictures for a while. You finish off the smoothing with the gouge or maybe a large skew chisel, then you get to work shaping. This is where we pick back up.
I never have a design in mind when I start these. I let the wood guide me in some cases (cool grain patterns get rounded, swoopy designs) and in others I make a wand trying to make a certain shape or something for practice.
For this one, I wanted to practice rolling beads. So I made a bead and then ran a groove down the middle. Then I made kind of a ring thingy there. You know. Professional-like.
There's the whole thing. Still a very simple design. I had made a few wands that got so complicated they all started looking alike, so I wanted to work on making simple designs that still looked good.
These are the two simpler designs I made from pieces of red oak. It chips out a bit, but I was using my old tools so that may not be the case anymore. I'm hoping to get delicate enough with my touch and to get my tools sharp enough that I can do complex designs even on chippy woods. Until then, some of them will look a little more "well-loved" than others. We'll just say they're Weasly hand-me-downs.
Here's a shot of almost all the wands I've made so far. I'm working on getting them all stained and coated with polyurethane now.
I don't know if you remember, but I picked up a piece of green wood from woodcraft. I don't mean green wood in that it was still wet (the normal meaning of "green" in woodworking). I mean that it was verde. I didn't quite know what to do with it, and I was hesitant to mess with any of those woods until I got some more experience under my belt.. But last night, I decided to chuck it up and go nuts.
Click on this one to blow it up. The grain in this wood is crazy. It looks...jungly? I have no idea how to describe it, but it's gorgeous and intricate. The wood is also a giant pain in my ass to work with. I'm really glad I waited to try it because I would've been completely lost otherwise.
With wood that has a strong grain like this, I like to do multiple rounded parts, since they really show off the grain. I've also been working on this particular "swoop" in my handles, and it suited this wand pretty well.
That's more or less the final shape. Sanding this beast took for-freaking-ever, as the wood is simultaneously sort of hard and sort of soft. Bizarre stuff.
This is how it looks sanded to 400-grit but before polyurethane. I just love the complexity of the grain.
This is what it looks like at my house when wands are drying. Eventually, I'm sure I'll come up with a better solution. Until then, it's bungee cords and plastic clamps. I also had an idea for how to keep track of my finishes. I wrote the same of the finish I used on a piece of paper and clipped it to the bungee cord so I would remember which stains/protectants I'd used and didn't mix them up. I didn't have too many mix-ups, but now that I'm getting into more expensive materials and more complex designs, I really want to minimize the potential for error.
So there you go. I'm going to set up a cool light box and a black velvet backdrop to take proper pictures of these things, since I'm going to start an Etsy store before too long. Wish me luck!
No comments:
Post a Comment