Turning a Set of Garden Tools
by Dennis Daudelin
Page 2 - Roughing out the wood blank
Here I'm using a spindle roughing gouge (1 1/4') to knock the corners off and to get a smooth, rounded blank. I'm turning one the 3rd belt of this lathe which is 1250 RPM. This is a good (middle) speed for spindle work.
Once the blank is round, we have a good starting point.
With the blank roughed out, we can now prepare the blank to hold the shafts of the garden tools. The directions say to drill a 3/8" so we've inserted our drill bit into a jacobs chuck and mounted the jacobs chuck into the tail stock.
I'm using a piece of blue tape as a marker to tell me when to stop drilling to the wood blank. The hole needs to be 2.5" as you can see above.
I will reduce the speed of the lathe to 500 RPM and drill in 1/2" to 5/8" increments, removing the dril and clearning the flutes.
When the drilling is one, I mount the included cone onto my live center so that I can get a perfectly centered support for the tail stock side of my work.
Now that our blank has been roughed out and the shaft hole drilled, let's go to Page 3 to turn the recess for the ferrule.
