If you've been around the turning world for long, you'll have seen turners wearing Cowboy Hats. The hats often can't be told apart from a cloth cowboy hat until you have it in your hands.
The art of turning cowboy hats was envisioned and perfected by Johannes Michelson, who still teaches classes in how to do this!
This is a challenging project! Taking an 80 lb. wet wood blank and reducing it to 10 oz. while shaping it into a cowboy hat is not for everyone!
But what a better way to show people that you are a wood turner??
We recently featured a project on how to make a wood turned Cowboy Hat. In that project, you put the finished turned hat into a jig while it dries. The jig helps the hat keep an oval shape during the drying and also allows you to bend the brim with the use of large rubber bands.
To help you make your own jig, this article shows pictures of several of Johannes Michelson's (The Hat Man) own jigs. And for those engineers or others needing formal plans, check out Don Kleinschnitz's SketchUp drawings for the hat jig at the bottom of this page. Don used the new (and free) Google SketchUp program.
As a bonus Don has also created a drawing of the Michelson Light Box / Rechucking jig for cutting the tops of the hats using light as a source for measuring the thickness of the top.
In this project, Guilo Marcolongo shows Ray Lanham how to make a cowboy hat. This is a step-by-step photo tutorial showing you the major parts of this project. It's intended to help you decide if you're interesting in taking on this type of project.
For most of us, the results are stunning and worth the effort!!
On this page, you will see the major steps that Johannes uses to make wood hats. This is the original Hat Man and you can see how he does it!! Johannes still teaches Hat making classes which you can find on his web site!
In this photo tutorial, Larry shows us each step along the path to turning a wood cowboy hat. He also explains how he uses light to determine thickness of the wood. If you're considering making your own hat, this tutorial is a must!
We update our home page about monthly to feature a new project, a new article, and a new and hot tool. Then we create a newsletter to alert our subscribers.
We never let anyone use our list, and our subscribers have been wonderfully loyal as a result.
