Whatcha got here that's worth living for?

...True....lathe...

At least I think that's how it went. Anyway. I now have a lathe and I've been going nuts with it. I've made half a dozen wands on it, with a few different sets of tools. I've learned a ton, and I'm going to help you all with some of the basics, as much as I can.

Okay, here's what I have:

That's a lathe and a small bench sander. Those are both very handy. A table saw and a miter saw are also handy for splitting 1x2s of various lengths into viable spindle material. You can probably get away without those, though. You'll just have to be a bit more picky about your raw materials.

This is wood. Trees make this out of dirt and time. You'll need some of this. I got these pieces at Woodcraft. They're all various species, and you can see just how very different they are. I've also gotten more than a little wood from Lowe's in the form of dowels or 1x stock. 1x2 is easy to find in various non-pine woods. The one by me has red oak, maple, alder and another one that starts with P that I don't like much. Poplar? Yeah, that's it. Poplar. I may give it a try sometime, but I'm prejudiced against it. It just looks sickly to me for some reason. Anyway, you can start with any of those, but it'll be easiest to start with what you can get in dowel format. It's already round so you don't need to rip it or anything. You can also get it in 3/4" diameter, which I think is a pretty good size for wands. I've started a couple from much larger than that and it just takes a lot of time to get them down to size. Unless you have a specific design that requires a much larger diameter for part of it, start small and stay small.

Now, a word on tool quality and value. I bought these chisels from Harbor Freight, the same place I got my lathe. I later went back and bought these chisels. I cannot adequately express to you how much better the second set is than the first. Yes, they cost twice as much. They are worth every penny. By extension, couldn't you also say that maybe these chisels would also be much nicer and easier to work with, and would therefore be worth every penny? This is what I call the point of diminishing returns. For a novice, the difference between crap tools and good tools will be noticeable and will make a difference in how easily you can learn the new skill. The difference between good tools and great tools will probably not be noticeable. Also, the increase in cost from crap to good is generally pretty small. The increase from good to great can be astronomical. Eventually, I will want to upgrade my chisels, I'm sure of it. Right now, they aren't holding me back at all, so I'm plenty happy with them. The first set was holding me back in a big way. I knew what I wanted to do, I knew how to do it, I just couldn't make the tools work for me. It was intensely frustrating. That said, I spent very little on my lathe, relatively speaking. I'm still exceptionally pleased with it. I could easily have spent twice as much without a significant increase in functionality. So I think the lathe itself was a good purchase and the original set of tools was a bad purchase. How do you know this stuff when you're just learning? You don't, unfortunately. You can read some books on it, ask a friend who knows better, see if the guy at the store can help, but you're really just abdicating responsibility. You won't know what is important to you in a tool and how much certain features are worth until you get the tools in front of you and try to live without those features or come to realize that you spent way more than you had to on stuff you don't use. It's just the nature of the beast, unfortunately. I'm sure there's some stuff that I haven't tried to do with my lathe yet that it can't do and that someone else would think is essential. They would think this was a bad purchase and would advise against it. And for what they're doing, they might be right. Frustrating, huh?

Anyway, enough on that. Suffice it to say, I have most of the tools I need to do what I want to do now. I have a few wand-specific needs that some of these tools can assist with. First, let me break down some of the different types of "centers" so you know what I'm talking about.

Headstock center - This is your driving center. It's putting the force into your piece to turn it.
Tailstock center - This one is either stationary or spins freely. There's no power to it, though.

Spur center - This is a drive center that has a central point with some teeth arrayed around it. The center point is your guide so you can make sure you put the stock onto it the right way, and the teeth bite into the surface of the wood and transfer the force from the motor to the piece itself. It's a pretty simple way to go, but it has a few limitations. For one, you're digging holes in the bottom of your piece. For one, your piece has to have a surface large enough for the teeth to bite into, and you have to be okay with damaging that surface. You also have to have a tailstock center with one of these, preferably a live center. The piece is held between the two points. This obviously won't work for bowls or plates or anything where you don't have a place for the tailstock to go. So these are great for spindles, but weak for most anything else. Get one small enough that the teeth will be able to gain purchase on the stock you're turning. The spur center that came with my lathe was far too large for what I was turning. I got the one from Amazon and it is much better. Not too expensive, either.

Jacobs Chuck or Drill Chuck - This one can work for holding wands if your stock is very small, or it can be used to hold actual drill bits. Sometimes, you'll want to drill directly into the center of a piece. Using one of these in your tailstock will let you drill a hole directly through the center of your piece. That can also be handy.

3, 4, or 6-Jaw Chuck - This is one that I don't have yet, but would really like to get. It's extremely versatile. You can use it inside the rim of a bowl (expand the jaws outward to get an internal grip) or you can use it to grab a dowel (tighten the jaws inward to get an external grip on a piece). These are very popular with people turning bowls and plates and such, since they can grab onto the piece without using the tailstock. A drive center like this one gives you a lot of freedom.

Screw Chuck -  This is a chuck that has a screw on the end. It's sort of like a spur center, except the screw holds the piece to the headstock, so you don't need the tailstock to keep it in place.I tried mine once and didn't have great luck with it. I'll try it again, though.

No Chuck - This is also an option for wand turning. Your lathe will most likely have a taper inside the headstock. The tapered end you've seen on the other centers just goes in there and gets a friction fit. You can taper the end of a dowel and tap it in there instead, and get a nice grip without any center or chuck or anything. I've done that once, and may do it again, depending on what I'm doing. The upside is that you can do without the tailstock, in theory. In practice, I wouldn't. It's also nice if you want to turn a wand and don't have the appropriate chuck or center to get a good grip on it.

I'm sure I've missed some, but now I'm bored of talking about that stuff. I want to talk about wands.

In the lathe world, wands are called "spindles" and what I've been doing is called "spindle turning" as opposed to "face turning" which is what you do with plates and bowls and such. Essentially, if your piece is long and thin and you don't decorate or hollow out anything on the ends, you're doing spindle turning. Some tools and techniques are more suited to this kind of turning, so that's mostly what I'm using. I get the feeling that spindle turning is looked down on by most wood turners, since hardly any of them actually do much of it in the videos I've watched and the books I've read. part of it is that there just isn't that much to do with spindles once they're done. You can make chair parts, and spoons or tool handles or something, but you're not in "cups, bowls, plates" territory, which is what a lot of turning seems to focus on.

Anyway, enough jibba-jabba. Let's get to pictures.

This is my first wand on the lathe. I call it the "Honey dipper" because it sort of looks like a bear. This was the wand I made before i realized that I could sand on the lathe and for some reason, I decided to make a buttload of tiny grooves on it. Those suck to sand by hand. Sanding them on the lathe would've been a snap. You live and learn, right? This one is made of oak, cut from a 1 1/4" x 6' oak staff I've had since high school. I've never done anything with it, so I figured that cutting it up and making it into pretty things was the best it could hope for. You'll notice that this is pretty chunky still. I started big and ended big, which is almost always how it goes. It's far too tempting to leave some giant bulbous knob on the wand when you start with big stock.

Again, the honey dipper, then a small cedar wand in the middle and another wand cut from a piece of the oak dowel on the right. It's more like a freakin' bat than a wand, though.


Anyway, that's probably good enough for one post. Please let me know if you have any questions. I'm still learning, but I know a little more now than when I started, so I guess that's something. Thanks for reading!