How to Use a Wood Turning Lathe

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Dave Trull with the Trull Gallery a custom furniture shop in St. Petersburg, Florida, and I'm going to talk to you about how to use a wood lathe. What I've started with today is an octagonal piece of wood. I turned it from a square to an octagonal to make it a little bit more round to begin with. So it's a little bit easier to true up. And what I've done is I've marked both ends with center points, which would ease in mounting it in a lathe. And what I'm going to do is simply mount one end into the head stock, the other into the tail stock, lock my tail stock down, go ahead and spin that in so it's nice and snug. And then lock that down as well. The next thing I want to do is set up my tool rest. And what you want to do is bring your tool rest so it's close to the stock you are working with, and right about the center point of the turning. Now I like to get it close by I, and then rotate the stock. And you want to make sure you are close, but not actually touching the stock. And here I've got about an eighth of an inch between my rest and the stock. I'm going to start with my gouge, it's a good tool for roughing out your stock. And when I start the lathe I'm going to make sure it is at it's slowest speed, because if you go too fast you are going to get really rough cuts. By going slow initially it will help you clean up with nice clean cuts. Now I'm going to work in holding the tool to my hip, supporting the tool itself, the blade in my left hand. And I'm going to come in high and slowly work my way down til I get a chip. And then it's just a matter of working back and forth with very little pressure initially, and you can hear that stuttering sound that is because we are not round. As you can see I'm working left to right, and rotating the chisel as I work. Not using the center portion of the chisel, but actually using the edge. At this point we can go ahead and lay out our box for our turning, so I'm just going to come in with my pencil on those marks and darken them up. The next thing I'm going to use is my parting tool, and this allows me to set the depth of my cuts. Now a good way to measure the depth of our cut is by using calipers. You can still use a gouge if you want to remove some of this stock, come in and just rough it out with the gouge. And I like to work downhill from the high spot to the middle. We've got a pretty finished shape, but it is still rough, and we can begin our sanding. I usually start with like a two twenty and work my way up from there. So those are the basics of how to use a wood lathe. I'm Dave Trull with the Trull Gallery, the fine art of furniture making."