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What We Produce with Woodturning

Listed below, are just some of the Items we can make with our traditional medieval woodturning lathe.
Read all about working with the timber below.

Working with the timber.

The first part of production is to acquire the timber (fairly obvious!). I have obtained wood from various sources, A Japanese Flowering Cherry which grew and died outside my house ended up being used, and I have even found a decent Cherry trunk in a skip. Softwood (Pine) is not too good, most hardwoods work well. Trunks can be cleft using felling wedges, whilst thinner timber and branch wood can be split with a froe (a type of splitting axe). After this, the wood is put onto a shave horse and rounded with a draw knife. A skilled bodger would have the item neatly rounded on the shave horse and would only use the lathe to finish off. (But I’m not that clever and my wood goes onto the lathe in a more rough state!) Branch wood is not the best timber to use, possibly being pithy and more likely to crack, but often it only needs the bark removing and a single split down the middle can give good results after rounding off.

Using greenwood techniques, I have produced a range of items; carrier bag handles, garden dibbers, rolling pins, spoons, light pulls, spirtles, potato mashers, fisherman’s priests, ornaments, Victorian-style baby’s rattles (one of which has been sent to America), and many other items. My latest venture is making bowls. Special items have included an abacus and one customer wanted a family-sized potato masher, but what she described, I called a potato frightener! It was absolutely massive, I made this specially and she took it home looking very happy. During one demonstration I made a mallet from a log, this took all afternoon and raised a great deal of interest, with the same people coming back repeatedly to see how I was getting on.

Candlesticks
Carrier Bag Handles
Dibbers
Fishermans Priests
Light Pulls
Newell Posts
Ornaments
Potato Masher
Proggers (for Rug Making)
Rolling Pins (miniature ones for use with Playdoh or Cake Icing)
Spirtles
Spoons
Vistorian Baby Rattles
....if it is round, we will have a go at making it!

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Wood types.

Certain woods are best for certain jobs: Beech, Birch and the Maple family (including Sycamore) have no taste or smell and therefore are ideal for cooking utensils; Beech and Ash are very hard woods whilst Hornbeam is the hardest native British wood and is ideal for items such as mallets (I used Hornbeam and Ash for the hinges and axels on the lathe treadles to try and keep wear & tear at bay); Oak was traditionally used in shipbuilding, but is acidic and can rot your tools; Elm is extremely hard, but these days, can be hard to come by in the aftermath of Dutch Elm Disease; oddities such as Broom are worth trying, but Gorse, like Oak, is acidic; fruit woods are also worth trying, Apple and Plum are nice, but Pear seems to crack readily; Horse Chestnut is ideal for wooden toys as it produces very few splinters, but even as I write, Horse Chestnuts are suffering from the combined actions of drought, the larvae of the Leaf Miner Moth, (which eats the leaves) and by Bleeding Canker, a disease which results in spots on the trunk which exude a dark liquid. Many Horse Chestnuts are already dead and many more will die, even some the survivors may have to be cut down for safety.

Tools.
Good tools of course, are essential. Most of my equipment is second hand, gained from many visits to flea markets and car boot sales. I have a range of chisels and gouges, an excellent billhook which is around 95 years old and have even found one or two hand-made tools. I am always on the lookout. Older tools are sometimes believed to be better than new ones, not so, the difference is that with older tools, the rubbish has been discarded and only the good items remain, whereas with new gear the rubbish is still around.
Special thanks to go to the lady who attended the Volunteer Awareness Event at Seaburn Hall in January 2009, for her kind donation of her husband's turning tools, she wouldn't take any payment for them, saying that she was only pleased to see them go where they would be used again. They have been very useful.
Peter (the Bodger & Storyteller)

© 2007 - 2011 Sunderland Countryside Rangers affiliated to the British Trust Conservation Volunteers Charity. Identification No. 51600. - All Rights Reserved

© 2007 - 2009 Sunderland Countryside Rangers affiliated to the British Trust Conservation Volunteers Charity. Identification No. 51600. - All Rights Reserved