The Wandering Wand...er...er. Shut up.

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!

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!

Workshop!

After a very (very) long hiatus, I'm back. Being crafty, like I do. So what have I been up to? Well I've been working on my workshop, for one. I am finally to this point:

Woo-hoo! It's actually easy to work out there now. I have all my tools in one place, and I know roughly where they are. I haven't had that...ever. It's awesome.

I also bought one of these:

Ain't she a beaut? I put it together (it comes fully assembled) and got to work on it. I bought it for one reason, really. Wands. I will do other things with it, certainly, but mostly it's about wands. So I made a few wacky, pitiful attempts at rounding off octagonal stock at first, then got to business on a 1" oak dowel I've had since high school. Sometimes there's a benefit to hoarding raw materials. This meant I could get started right away on this project, rather than having to go out and buy more stuff.

here's what I came up with. Not all done yet, but pretty close. It will get another coat of stain tonight and then some polyurethane to seal it up and keep it looking pretty. Probably plenty more lathing, too. I've got big plans!

Gassy Wood

So we showed you how to make an alcohol stove, but what if you don't have any alcohol? What if all you have is a 10-foot tall pile of small bits of wood? What do you do then, smart guy?

If you've been reading this blog, what you do then is produce your homemade woodgas stove from your backpack and get to business. Here's how to make one.

We got the ideas from here, and followed it as closely as we could: Make Your Own Woodgas Stove

First, cans:

The one on the right is an empty paint can, available for purchase from most any hardware or paint store. I got this one at Lowe's for $3, but later found a much better price on them at Guiry's for $1.40 apiece, so I'll be going there from now on. The can on the left should be (according to the instructions we followed) a one-pint paint can. We can't find a one pint paint can for anything other than a ridiculous price. So we have a 20 oz pineapple can. Exact same diameter (3 3/8") as a pint can, but about half an inch taller. I'm going to keep looking and see if I can find a can that will match the one-pint can more exactly, but this one worked well enough. Here's what it was before:

This stuff is delicious. I would rather eat this and use the can in good conscience than spent $8 on rubber cement in a 1-pint can that I have to pour out. We are going to keep experimenting with different cans, and I'll let you know if I find anything better.

First thing you do is to take the bottom off the can with a safety can opener. This isn't one of those, which is why it isn't working. Don't skimp. Get the real safety can opener. ours cost $8 and it worked astonishingly well. Left a smooth surface on both sides of the cut and actually allows you to use the lid as a lid again if you want. I don't know how it works, but my money is on magic.

There we go. Much better. You'll see the ugly scars on the can from the first attempt. We had to go buy more cans after I screwed up the one I'd gotten originally.

Yet another failed attempt at doing something. We drilled a hole in the can and tried to use a holesaw to cut out the bottom of the can, leaving a narrow strip around. It didn't work. It made awful noises very effectively, but not much else.

This worked much better. I have a ton of tin snips at my house from various previous projects (trying to find the style that would let me cut through 18-ga stainless without my hand cramping up. I'm still looking.) and they worked like a charm. Just cut along one of the ridges and then sanded it a touch to smooth it out.

There we go. Now there's enough of a ledge in there so the wire mesh can sit on top. You'll see what I'm talking about soon.

Here's the new paint can with the bottom cut off with the appropriate tool. It was much easier and looks so much prettier.

Okay, this is what I was talking about. Get some wire mesh (I had some laying around the garage. Tell me you're surprised.) and cut it to size so it will fit into the opening of the can. You should use some JB weld to stick this down. We didn't and after the first burn, it had changed shape enough to just rattle around in there now.

Now we use my handy-dandy metal punch to poke holes in the inside can. My punch didn't come with dies big enough to do the holes described in the instructions, so we made smaller holes and just had more of them. This metal punch has been discontinued as far as I can tell, so you'll have to use a drill or something to make your holes.

Using the punch to poke holes in the outer can. We used tape to give us a line for these since it'll actually show.

JB Weld all up in the house. We put this on the inner can and then put it into the outer can. in the future, we'll be applying the JB weld to the outer can and then sticking the inner can into it. Also, we'll be letting the JB Weld cure overnight before burning. We got impatient and burned after just an hour or so and cooked out most of the JB Weld, so now the whole thing rattles around.

So there you have it. Paint can on the outside, pineapple can on the inside, with the wire mesh on the bottom.

Test burn in the garage. We didn't feel like gathering wood, so we burned popsicle sticks. I have thousands of them. You may notice that there's some flame on the ground. That's because Isaac added a little alcohol to the wood in this stove by pouring it from the other stove and managed to make a right mess of things in the process. Isaac is why we can't have nice things.

After a while, the wood will stop burning smokily and you'll see the jets of flame coming out of the interior ring of holes. This is the wood gas burning. It works much better if you really pack the stove full of fuel and then just let it burn, but we kept adding small amount of wood to it over and over, so we were really slowing down the process. It's a really awesome effect to see in person.

Isaac, redeeming himself from the earlier alcohol debacle, built us a tiny pot stand to use with my Ti Cookpot. It worked beautifully. I haven't yet figured out how to get everything to nest, unfortunately. I'll keep working on it.


Okay, speaking of nesting, here's something very very cool. This wasn't planned, but I really don't know that you could plan it any better.

These are all the pieces. The wood gas stove, the cookpot and the aluminum stove.

If you turn the woodgas stove over and take the bottom off, you can slide the cookpot into the space between the two cans. It's a perfect fit. The best part is that the alcohol stove also nests inside the wood gas stove's inner compartment, and the whole thing fits into the little carry sack that came with the cookpot. You can have an alcohol-fueled mini-stove, a wood-fueled larger stove and a cookpot (w/ spork!) all in one really handy package. Awesome for camping where you don't know how long you'll be out or what the temperature will be, or what fuel you'll be able to find. Sounds like a bug out bag to me.

So there you go. Thanks so much for reading and please let me know if you have any questions.

Stoves!

So, this weekend, my friend Isaac came over and we made some stoves. Before that, I tried to do some testing with a stove my friend Martin lent me, to see what we thought about the design options we had available. Here's how it all went down.

This is Martin's stove, nestled down inside my fire pit. It's a really awesome little stove, and very well made. If you aren't interested in building stoves and would rather buy one, this one is pretty awesome. Here's where you can get it: WhiteBox Stoves.

This is probably as good a time as any to explain how this works. The stove doesn't need a pot stand, doesn't need a priming pan. It's one little self-contained unit, which I think makes it perfect for putting into an emergency kit. All you do is fill it up with some fuel, then light it. The fuel will burn in the main chamber in the middle while it heats up the stove itself. Once the stove gets hot enough, the alcohol inside starts to boil, and the gas comes out the little holes on the side and ignites. Then you get this really pretty fire flower sort of effect. You put the pot on top and voila. All set. The reason I mention pot stands and priming pans is that some designs do need those things. A pot stand is basically just something to put the pot on so it isn't sitting on top of the stove directly. Some stove designs require air to flow in through the top, so you have to have a pot stand. Also, some stoves can't self-heat, so you have to use a wick or a priming pan to heat them up. For those, you put some fuel on the wick or in the priming pan and light that, and then that will burn and heat up the stove. It isn't the end of the world, but it's more pieces to worry about. This is an elegant design, I think.

This is my titanium cook pot. It's pretty awesome, and you can get it here: Ti Cookset It comes with the pot, the lid, a titanium spork and a bag to carry it all. I like it because it's a good size for boiling enough water to rehydrate a Mountain House meal or make hot cocoa or whatever, but it's not way bigger than I need.

This is the fuel we used for testing purposes. it's super cheap, you can get it anywhere, and it burns nice and clean.

I took pictures of the little stove without the pot on it, but you can't see the flames in the full sunlight so they're kinda dull. It was crazy windy out, so the poor stove kept blowing out, even inside the protection of the firepit. It still did get the water very nearly to boiling, though. In super-windy conditions, a windscreen would be very nice. I'm thinking about a design for one, and I'll post it up here if I get it figured out.

When Isaac came over, we wanted to do another test of the stove to make sure that it wasn't going out because the pot was suffocating it, so we did a burn in the garage and it worked beautifully. You can see the flame jets here pretty clearly.

Did you know Bud Light was available in aluminum bottles? Neither did I. Mostly because I don't drink beer and even if I did, I wouldn't drink Bud Light. But the bottle is very useful for this exercise, and so I bought some. The lady at the store asked "Is this any good?" and I said "I have no idea. I'm going to go home and pour it down the drain." Anyway, you take one of these bottles and empty it out in whatever manner pleases you most, then make some cuts in it. We used a large pipe-cutting tool (which you will have seen on my home improvement blog) to make the cuts and it seemed to work pretty well. I'm thinking we may just use the bandsaw for the cuts in the future, though. Anyway, you can decide how big you want your stove to be, and that will influence your cuts. We made ours roughly 2" tall, so we cut about 2 1/4" off the bottom and cut the top of the bottle off right where it stops curving down and goes straight into the sides of the bottle.

Now you want to prep the "top" which will become the inside of the stove. You cut the top down so from the wide part, it's about 2" long. The wide part will end up being up and will seal against the inside of the bottom of the bottle. The bottom part will rest against the bottom of the inside of the bottle. To provide a means for the alcohol to flow from the middle to the outer chamber, you need to make these little grooves in the neck part. We used a very small file. Just about anything would work. They don't have to be any particular shape, but keep them pretty small.

This is what I mean. You get the top turned over and stuck down inside here. This is all friction fit so there's no glue or rivets or anything. Again, it's a very simple, elegant design.

Now, we're rolling the edge of the outer piece over the top of the inner piece to lock them We used an aluminum bar fragment to kinda push them over and if I had it to do over again, I would've used a piece of wooden dowel instead. But still, it worked. We got our rolled edge and it actually looked okay. Not as pretty as the WhiteBox one by a long way, but not too awful, either. Essentially all I did was to use the bar to push the outer edge in and down so it folded over the inside layer. There's not a ton of finesse to it. After that, we put the stove down on the bench top and used the bar to squeeze down and smooth out the edge a bit.

We're drilling the holes. We waited until this point to do it for no real reason, and I think I'd prefer to do it before the inside piece is in for the future. Any little drilling particles that get inside would be much easier to get out that way. We also though the drill holes would be much larger than the thumbtack holes and so we spaced them farther apart. We didn't need to. They're actually very close to being the same size, so putting them as far apart as we did just meant less flame on the stove.

So there's our goofy little stove. it isn't perfect, but it's a decent first try.

And it's enough to boil some water.

So that's the end of that stove, and the end of this post. I'll write up the other stove tomorrow, hopefully.

Thanks for reading!