Taking up wood turning at my age may have been a step to far because the learning curve is very steep. Not only does one have to come to terms with the lathe itself but also the many ways of holding wood onto the machine. Suddenly my world was populated with scroll chucks, chuck screws, steb centres, live centres and faceplates. Then there's the tools to consider, things like bowl gouges, spindle gouges, scrapers, roughing gouges, parting tools and the dreaded skew chisel.
When I was considering buying a lathe I didn't know that it could be quite a dangerous hobby. Okay, perhaps not as death defying as skiing down the side of the Matterhorn or base jumping, but people have been injured and others even killed while operating a lathe.
Getting ones clothing or hair caught in the spinning machinery are two of the main causes of death along with being hit by a lump of wood that hasn't been secured properly to the chuck or face plate. The other thing that can can go wrong is when the gouge or one of the other tools is presented to the wood incorrectly and it digs into the wood. This has happened to me a few times now and it doesn't half give me the gyp. I keep having visions of the tool spinning out of my hand a stabbing me in the chest.
Anyway, I persevered and, with one eye on safety at all times, I managed to turn a couple of things. The first was this small candle stick, which was turned from a very boring piece of practice wood. It had no grain patterns of any consequence so I went over what was there with my pyrography iron to liven it up.
The second thing I turned, this time from a piece of square beech, was a small rolling pin. The greatest part about this was that I used the dreaded skew chisel to get the thing round, and I did it without hardly getting a tool mark on it. I tried my best to turn both ends so that they looked the same and I don't thing they are too far out.
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