Wood Turning a Bowl: Safety & Lathe Speed Rules

Video Transcript

"As far as safety goes, you can't be safe enough when you're working with wood. And especially, with a piece of wood that is spinning. You know, like that bark could have come off and hit us or even a tool, we might catch it. We've got to have some good safety rulers here. And so what I want to do, is tell you that there's a. We've got a bit of a formula here that will give us some safe guidelines. And what it is, is you take the diameter of the piece. Take the diameter here. And then, we're going to times it by, say, take that, you got to times it by the RPM of the lathe. Now we want that to do, on our RPM, is we want that to equal on a bowl, I want to be, make sure I'm going a little slower than fast I want that to equal about five thousand. When I'm roughing it. And then, as I finish the bowl, I want to go to, I can turn the speed up and I'm going to end up around eight thousand. O.k. Now don't get caught up in what all this means. It's just, try and keep this simple. Take the diameter, times the RPM. And you want to end up, when you roughing. You want to start right here. And then, when you're finishing, you want to be in here. So let's say, I had a ten inch diameter piece. To make it easy. That's pretty easy. I can take ten inches here. And then, I have to, to get into five thousand. Put five hundred, in there. And that, gives me my speed. That I want to start at. So it's pretty simple to do. Take your diameter and then plug it in. And you want to end up with this kind of a formula. Use that and that will be a good starting point for you, on that. And always err on the side of keeping it at a lower speed. Than a faster speed. Especially, when you're starting out."