Handle

For our first assignment with the wood lathe, I made a handle. We were given a template, but I opted to go freestyle instead and follow what moved me.

The template.

I used a mallet to mark the drive center on both ends of my dowel, then began roughing the piece using a round nose scraper.

The dowel, pre-roughing.

The video isn’t great, but basically what I discovered during this process was that:

1. I need to make sure the drive center is fastened tightly. Initially, as I was roughing the dowel it would often stop and I couldn’t figure out why this was until I tightened it, which solved the problem.
2. Smooth, gentle motions are key. I was initially cutting in too roughly which made for ugly, torn areas (there are still a few ugly cuts on the finished product but I think for the most part I smoothed them out).
3. The wood lathe is fun as hell! I could have spent hours doing this but I had to go to class.

I ended up with a design I really liked with rounded notches of varying lengths for your fingers.

The final product.

I stained it using Varathane and am leaving it overnight to dry — another learning experience was not to stain anything in the spray paint zone because I’m pretty sure a bunch of paint flakes are now stuck in my wood stain, but we live and learn.