The Mallet of many mistakes

In last months woodturning magazine there was a project-in-a-day feature for making a mallet. I caught my eye because the head of the mallet was made from lignum vitae, a very dense hard wood which is normally found in the balls used for lawn bowls. As it happens I was recently given a couple of these by my Grandfather for the specific purpose of using the wood in a turning project.
The handle in the project was made from ash, and I had a similar dimensioned block of sycamore which I figured would do just as well. And so it seemed destined to be my next project.

And here is the finished piece

The eagle eyed woodturner might now be saying…”that doesn’t look like sycamore”. They would be right, and this is because it is in fact applewood. The reason why lies amongst the many things that went wrong trying to do this project.

So I had the materials I needed, and I had step by step instructions in the magazine. So what could possibly go wrong?

The first job was to drill through the centre of the lignum ball with a forstner bit. See the magazine image here

Easy right, just use a clamp to hold the thing still, and away you go.

Not so much. I probably could have spent much more time making a proper base to sit the sphere in which would have kept it stable. But I was trying to follow the magazine, and wanting to make progress. So I got the smallest clamp that I had, that would clamp around the size of the sphere. This is not a small clamp. It was rather difficult to hold it in place, much of the weight of the clamp is not over the drill press, and so I needed to hold it as best I could in place to try and get a good line through the centre of the sphere. Within moments of starting to drill another thing became clear. Removing dense wood with a 35mm forstner bit creates a lot of sawdust. Which makes things difficult to see,k and also jams up the drilling process unless you can remove it. So Wheeled across my dust extractor. But I currently have no way to mount it for the drill press, so I had to try and hold it nearby. This means I am now holding a clamp and a extractor hose, and trying to operate the drill press. Not easy, but not impossible. Then I hit a point that should have been apparent from the outset. My forstner bit is not long enough to go through the whole ball. The chuck of the drill is wider that the bit, so I could drill a little over half way and that was it.

Hmm, the article did not mention this challenge. ‘Obviously’ all I needed to do was turn the ball up the other way, and drill in from the other side. So now I’m trying to hold a vice and a extractor hose, whilst working the drill press, AND I need to be accurate enough to get the lines to meet perfectly.

What actually happened was that I made it connect almost perfectly, but not quite. I wasn’t sure how much of a problem the slight misalignment would cause me. I used a few tools to try and minimise the step between the two drill shafts. At this point I figured it was as good as it was going to get. So it would have to do.

Ok, then onto the handle. The steps said to turn between centres, shape the handle, and the tenon.

And so that is what I did, carefully setting the tenon the correct diameter for the hole I had drilled. I decided not to go too crazy with the finishing at this stage, so I sanded it down but didn’t apply any finish.
The next step was to take the handle off the lath, and use a bandsaw to cut a cross down the tenon. This is so that it fits easier through the hole in the mallet head. Then at the end you insert wedges to hold everything in place and make for a nice feature at the head end.

Keen eyed observes will not there are no wedges in the end of my mallet.

Having cut the cross through the tenon section it did indeed fit through the hole of the head section. And then I just needed to remount between centres. The magazine said that the prongs of the drive centre would fit into the cuts from the bandsaw.

Something I should have noticed is that they talked about a four prong drive centre. I only have a 2 prong drive centre. Though I suspect I would have had similar issues even with the 4 prong, I found it was basically impossible to get the thing remounted centrally. The handle was now turning a little off it’s previous axis.

I started to shape the head of the mallet anyway, I figured that it might not be too bad, slightly off centre only really shows when it’s rapidly spinning.
However the magazine steps said to blend the handle with the head a little. I was starting to shape the head, and noticing that things were not looking as they should. In a moment of madness I thought I might be able to blend the handle down to it’s new axis, and it wouldn’t matter. But of course there was not enough width in the shoulder of the tenon to cope with being turned off centre. A hasty cut and the whole thing was ruined. I also realised that there was no way I would get the mallet head shape in the article without cutting a chunk from the bottom of the ball, to being a wider part close to the handle. The article didn’t mention that either. Of course it would have made things much easier on the drill press if I had STARTED by cutting a chunk from the bottom, and making a parallel flat at the top.

At this point I left it with disgust for a few days. The handle was ruined, and I didn’t think I had anything else of the right dimensions available.

At this point I contemplated how I *should* have approached this.
Step 1 cut a section from one side of the ball, to bring a reasonable width to what will be the bottom of the mallet.
Step 2, cut a parallel shallow flat at the top. Step two, with the ball resting flat on the drill press, with a vice just to stop it spinning, drill as deep as I could go from one end.
Step 3 mount the ball on my expanding jaw chuck, the narrow jaws should fit inside the 35mm hole, I could then put the forstner bit in my tailstock chuck. And drill from the other side with a much better chance of true alignment.

For the handle I figured I should have turned such that the tenon was at the headstock end, and left a piece on the end for the drive centre. Turning the drive centre waste narrower than the tenon I could pass the whole lot through the mallet head without cutting any wedges and remount exactly on the same drive points as turned the handle.

I discovered that I had a piece of applewood that I turned down to a cylinder about a year ago, and left drying inside some paper bags. It was just about the perfect size for the project and I figured I was back in business. But I kept the mallet head from before rather than attempt to start again.
I also didn’t bother to do any handle shaping before I put the mallet head in place. I just turned the tenon. I wanted to be sure that if I had any trouble getting things back on a central axis that I had more material to play with.

I put some work into sheering the base of the mallet head flat and in line with the shoulder of the tenon. To get a nice tight fit. The tenon was just the right width that I needed to hammer it through the lignum.

And so I could proceed to shape the lignum to the mallet shape I wanted. This went mostly ok, though I had far too many catches trying to shape the ends. I still struggle to avoid causing spiral catches, even when I think I’m being careful.

Once shaped, sanded and finished. IT just remained to shape the bottom of the handle which I did eventually parting it off. This then left me with a stub of wood above the top of the mallet that needed to be removed.

So I took it to the bandsaw to remove most of the waste. And decided to sand the remainder on my belt and disc sander.
This was another mistake. The disc sander is very aggressive and difficult to present things at it square on. And so I wound up with an off-centre flat spot on top. I evened it up as much as I could, but in doing so I found I had revealed a gap where the rough hole through the lignum was not perfectly round and the tenon passing through did not fill it.

At this point I figured the easiest thing to do would be to just fill the hole with sawdust and glue. Which is less obvious than a hole, but still not as nice as doing the job right.

The finished article is actually very nice. In some ways I’m loathe to actually use it as a mallet because I don’t want to damage the beautiful lignum mallet head. However this project was a stark reminder that I am still such a novice. So many things went wrong. Blindly following the steps in teh article without thinking it through myself was a mistake. I’m almost tempted to try again from scratch, just to see if I can make it right, or whether I’d just hit another slew of problems. Maybe one day.

Making a chess set part 2 – The Bishop

Feeling good about how the king had gone, I set to work on the bishops.
I decided that the thing to do would be to turn 2 head-to-head in a single length of wood. This would mean I only pay the ‘cost’ of work holding once for two pieces.
As with the king, and all the pieces, this was simple between centres turning. No special chucks, I didn’t even need to engage the prongs on the 4 prong drive centre, the force of just the point and a live centre at the tailstock was sufficient to do all the primary turning. Though I did use a 4 jaw chuck to finish some pieces.

Turning head-to-head meant that whenever I set the calipers for a measurement I would be able to make it on both pieces, and save time.

Fairly quickly things looked like this

I was cautious about not making things too thin until I had to.
In particular doing the heavy wood removal to get things down to rough diameters before going too thin anywhere.

This was a balance of how close to complete I wanted to get them before I applied the finish, and how much would be left to refinish once actually split into separate pieces.

I decided to blend the heads into each other, to ensure that the top diameters would be the same

Once I finished and split the two pieces, I left them intending to finish them at home with a sander, and possibly my small chuck to help the process

What I realised was that the match wasn’t as close as I’d have liked, it wasn’t bad, but the thing that made it easier to get the kings matching was the ability to hold one up against the other.

I realised that I’d be better off turning different pieces in a single length. E.g. a bishop and a knight. That way I’d either be turning something for the first time, or I’d be able to compare to one already made.

So the next day when I went to turn a bishop in ebony, I actually combined it with turning a knight and a pawn. I did worry that the overall spindle might become too long, and vibrate too much. But the pawn being fairly small only added a little more.

In practice I did struggle a lot with bounce of the tool, due to the spindle flexing and vibrating under cutting. But mostly I was able to use very light cuts to diminish it, and sand away what was left.

Here we see the very early stages of setting out the pieces in a length of ebony.

You can see how I first went down the length marking and parting in to show the boundaries of the different body parts. One thing I did hit here is that you need to take your time. Once during the week I turned to take a measurement, turned back and started parting away material, only to realise too late I was one section further over than I should have been. All those sections can look very similar in the early stages. Lesson learned…take your time.

Here we can see how the bishop is exactly the same in this design to the knight, up to the head.

You can also see that the pawn was being turned on the end.

Again I worked through each piece forming the basic shape, working down to making the thinner sections. Rather than do one piece and then move to the next. Partly because I didn’t want a thin neck section already turned when I was taking heavy cuts on the next piece. Also because, being a set, they have elements which match, and so the measuring is common, at least for the base of each piece.

It was about this time that I hit a dilemma for my bishop. I made a shaping cut on the head of the black bishop. And found that I’d hit upon a shape and size which was bigger than the ones I’d already turned, which I preferred.
So I had to decide, do I carry on and turn it down to match the ones already done. Or decide to discard those two as practice and stick with the new shape.

Well since I’d not been terribly happy with how they’d gone, I decided I’d only regret it if I stuck with that shape. So I left the black bishop as the new template for the bishops.

Here we can see me turning another white bishop to match it, again I was turning a bishop head-to-head with a knight.

All the bishops I left with waste wood at the base, rather than completing them, since I knew I’d need to form the cut in the heads. And I’d probably need that waste wood to hold them firm. Not having any appropriate tools to do the job in France. I left them to finish at home.

My plan is to practice on the bishops that I turned first. To figure out what tool will work. Possibly a coping saw, making a fine cut. Or maybe a rotary tool, though I’m wary that rotary tools can easily skip away from where you want to carve.

I’ll update this page once I’ve completed the bishops to show the finished pieces. For now here are the ones I’ve done in their mostly finished state

Making a chess set. Part 1- The King

As a geek and a wood turner. One of the most obvious things to attempt to make on the lathe is a chess set.
In fact it was probably one of the first things I thought of to work towards. I did a lot of research at the time, and found that chess designs are not particularly readily available on line. At least not for free.
Though obviously there are plenty of pictures.

Realising that making a chess set was likely to be quite hard. I did not attempt to go straight for that, and actually left it to focus on other things, though my intention remained to attempt one when I got good enough.

Not last Christmas, but the one before, my lovely girlfriend decided to set me on the path to the chess set I’d talked about making, by giving me some sticks of ebony and boxwood with which to actually make a start. This was very cool, but faced with actual materials to start with, I was even more conscious that I wasn’t good enough to do a good job, and didn’t want to waste the gift.

A couple of weeks ago we went to France to visit Kat’s dad, and his workshop:-) -After over a year of not using my gift, I finally decided it was time to have a go. Spurred on by Kat saying she’d rather see the wood used for something than left gathering dust!

The first thing I needed to decide upon was  a design to go for. I didn’t want to do the classic ’standard’ style chess set. Mainly because I didn’t fancy having a go at the knights. But also because I wanted to try something a little different than the sets we already own.

Originally I tried to draw designs of my own based on things I half remembered seeing:

But I wasn’t very happy with them, then I came across this page Daydreams: turning my own chess pieces that contained some interesting links, and a picture of an unusual chess set at the top of the page, which apparently was “turned out of a piece of 13th Century Oak by an English turner on pages 30, 31 of Gareth Williams’ Master Pieces: The Architecture of Chess”
Like the author of that page I like the design and so I set to drawing it out as a schematic in my makers note book.

With designs in hand I set off to France with my ebony and boxwood, and my narrow parting tool. This turned out to be a good idea since Kat’s dad does not have one, and I used it for most of the sizing and laying out of the pieces. Pretty much everything else I turned with a smallish spindle gouge with a fingernail grind.

I decided to start with the king (uh huh)

The other important tool I took with me was a set of vernier calipers. With this I basically measured things right from my diagram on the page, locked them in, and transferred them to the wood. I started by measuring the distances between the major features, such as the widest points and the narrowest points. I actually used the points on the calipers to mark the wood transferring the sizes exactly.
I used the parting tool to carefully reduce the diameters for each section to the widest mark. Then part down to the narrowest points. before using the spindle gouge to form the curves.
I constantly turned to refer back to the design, and used the calipers to check sizing.

It did not take long before I had something that looked like my king design

I decided to finish with finishing oil, and here you can see it stood next to its drawing all finished.

Of course I knew I’d done the easy part. I’d made one piece. But it was pretty close to the intended design, so that was a good start.

The next day I set to work on the same design in ebony. The ebony was not as nice to work with, as it mostly came off in fine black powder, which turned my hands black. I obviously was concentrating as I failed to take any in progress pictures.
This time as well as referring to the design, I often held the white king up to the in progress black king to compare against what I actually ended up with, not just what I’d intended. This helped get some of the curves to match.
Ultimately I ended up with something which I feel matches pretty well.

And so I was started on my way to a chess set of my own.

In part two, I’ll look at the bishops.

Captured ring rattle

Update: – Have updated where I talk about regulation, unfortunately the choice of wood here is unsuitable for children

Ever since I made a captured ring bottle stopper last year. I have been thinking about making another project with captured rings.

At the time I made the bottle stopper I made the captured ring using just a basic skew chisel and spindle gouge. And then I made a tool of my own to try to make it easier in the future. I took a long masonry nail and used the bench grinder to shape the head into a hook type shape.

I knocked up a basic handle on the lath and presto, I had a captured ring tool.

And I set to work having a go with it. Where I totally failed to make a captured ring. I made two attempts, and both times I had a catch which completely snapped the ring shape. So I gave up in disgust.

Until a couple of weeks ago.

The desire to try again with captured rings came when I saw my niece, who is fast approaching one year old. It occurred to me that I could attempt to make a baby’s rattle on the lathe as a present. This would give me a reasonable challenge, but also a real use for the finished item, beyond just making something else for my increasingly crowded mantle piece.

I had recently purchased an interesting piece of wood with beautiful contrasting heart and sap wood, in a stick that would be about the right size for the rattle project.

Whilst on the subject of size. I shall point out now that this project turned out pretty big. Considering it’s intended recipient is a tiny baby, the rattle is more like ‘adult’ size. There are a couple of reasons for this.

Firstly I’m not sure I’d be able to make captured rings much
smaller than this without them being too fragile.
Secondly when I was doing some research online I found an article about making a rattle which pointed to some regulations on making children’s toys. Aside from the obvious use of a toy safe finish, it mentioned that if any part of the toy can be inserted into a 42mm diameter hole to a depth of 30mm then it is considered a choking hazard. So I made the ends of this big enough that I couldn’t get it in my mouth, let a lone a babies mouth.

UPDATE: Unfortunately when I took this to my wood turning group, the experienced turners said their best guess is that the wood is laburnum. I had thought it couldn’t be because it was a different colour to what I know of laburnum. However, apparently it darkens with age. Of course this means the wood is poisonous! I was also told that regardless there are European regulations that say children’s toys must only be made from fruit woods. Apparently fruit woods don’t splinter, so if bitten by an enthusiastic child there is no harm done. Despite all this it was an interesting exercise to make, and I will probably make another out of a fruit wood sometime soon.

Once I’d roughed my piece down to a cylinder I started out by marking out the basic sections of the rattle, base, handle, mid section, stem with 3 rings, and top. I spaced out the 3 rings to make sure I had as much room as possible on each side of each ring to cut under.

Having shaped the basic outside profile of the rings I began to cut away material to start cutting the underside of the centre ring. At this point, a lack of concentration led to a catch which snapped off a section of what would be the outside of the ring.

Oh bother!. I exclaimed.

Quickly the realisation was that I’d done just enough cutting that this effectively ruined the piece.
These are not good moments in wood turning. It’s somewhat frustrating to find that I still lack the ability to avoid nasty catches. And as it turns out this would not be the last on this project.

After some contemplation I found the section that had snapped off, and was pleased to note it was in a single piece. This good fortune meant that I decide to have a go at gluing it back on. Using a small clamp to hold it under pressure whilst the glue dried.

I then left it for about a week. Partly because I was busy, partly because I was a little apprehensive to continue working and risk another catch, that would be un-recoverable.

Eventually I returned to the garage and began work releasing the first ring. I was pleased to note that it was very hard to see where the glue line was even after a small amount of reshaping.

Having released the first ring ok I was feeling better about the process. I used my home made ring tool, and was very careful to go slow, and keep it under control. Light cuts to avoid a nasty catch. And it worked pretty well. In the end I made short work of releasing all three rings, and found the under side of each ring was pretty good. Not perfect, there was a small ridge on one where I didn’t quite meet up cutting in from both sides. But over all I was happy with how they looked.

At that point I quit whilst I was ahead and went to think about exactly how I wanted to shape the main handle etc. I drew about 6 designs in my makers book, all had things I liked, but ultimately I picked a shape tapering from wide to narrow, rather than a centred curve, or straight profile.

Pretty much after the rings where released, the rest was easy. Shaping and then sanding and finishing. Except for that last little mistake…
Literally making the last cut, too free the base of the handle, I managed to have a catch which sent my spindle gouge in a spiraling cut back up the previously finished curve of the handle-base. Leaving a deep gouged spiral. I really hate what I do this. I understand why it happens, but seem incapable of stopping my self make this basic mistake, and exactly the worst moment.

However as experience has shown, it’s normally possible to simply re-cut a profile, and refinish. And no one need ever know…

In fact it seems you can have fairly bad catches, stupid mistakes etc. And still recover the piece fairly well. that’s not to say I don’t still curse somewhat when I mess up, but having faith that it can be repaired can help.

The finished piece:

I really like how the colours of this wood work, particularly on the rings

Something I discovered was that due to the different density between the light wood and the dark wood. The rings naturally want to fall into grain alignment. No matter how you spin them, if you just gently rock them they will always spin back to being in line. Which is pretty neat.

I also quite like the little ‘gashes’ on the end, I believe where bark has effectively grown inside a fold of wood. These look like holes, but they are smooth to the surface.

Now unfortunately I can’t give it to my niece, I shall have to make another from something like apple wood. This one will be relegated to being something to fiddle with on my desk at work.

Candle snuffer, take 2

For this months HWA meeting my challenge had been set as a candle snuffer. I had already made one, exactly as it had been shown in the intructions I was given.
But the second candle snuffer I made, I decide to make articulated. This was really challenging, but I was determined to do something more interesting. The idea was that if the challenge of the candle snuffer project is to get it sitting flat on a surface, getting the angle between handle and bell correct. Then the obvious solution is to make it articulated and hence always be able to achieve that angle.

To do this I made it in 4 parts.
Handle – pretty much as before, I decided to make the handle reflect other parts of the design. So the end was shaped to a similar profile to the bell, and a bead around the handle was intended to reflect the ring used for pivoting the bell.

Bell – I actually made this from 4 sticks of 2 different colours stuck together, such that like colours where on opposing corners. I was worried that it would be difficult to centre, but it actually came out perfectly.
The design for the bell piece had a long narrow top, that would ultimately have a pivot pin pass through it.

Ring – This needed to be large enough to have the tip of the bell pass through, with room to move, But small enough to feel in proportion with the handle and bell.

Pivot – this was just turning down to a thin stick that was as long as the rings diameter.

By far the hardest part was the ring, it took about 5 attempts to get it right. Annoyingly the first attempt was pretty good, but I managed to crack it slightly tapping in the pivot, then I managed to drop it smashing it entirely…ouch

Subsequent attempts largely failed, I eventually realised, because the laburnum I was trying to use was simply too open grained to hold such a fine shape. Once I moved to a very closed grain wood, I finally got it right.

The pivot was slightly tapered, this wasn’t entirely intentional but was ultimately a good thing, as it meant I could make the hole on one side of the ring slightly larger than the other, and peg the pivot in place fairly easily but into a tightening fit.

After several attempts at the ring I think I got the right sequence to shape it and drill holes.
First I shaped the outer ring profile, then bored, end grain, to hollow it whilst leaving it still attached.
At this point, I took it off the chuck, and used the main body of wood to clamp it in my drill press.
Here I could drill the hole for the pivot and a recess for the handle to fit into.
If I screwed up here, I hadn’t wasted tool much time sanding and finishing. In one attempt I tried to drill before bothering to hollow out the ring, However that made it much harder to get the pivot holes nicely centred.

Having drilled the holes, and hopefully not made a mess of it, I could rechuck the piece, and begin sanding and finishing the ring shape more, This also means you clean up the edges of the holes just drilled.

Last job was to part the ring off the main body. An earlier attempt had also given me the idea to cover up the bin hole I made in my attempts for a tidier workspace
Whilst the hole is great for sweeping shavings into, it also turns out a parted off ring is quite likiely to fall into it. And it’s amazing how long it takes to find a small ring of wood, in a bag full of wood shavings, even if it has just gently fallen on top

I had to widen one of the holes for the pivot pin, since it was wider at one end than the other. This works well, as I didn’t need to glue it in place, and while the final fit is quite firm, there was no need to tap it into place with a hammer. Which is what has caused my first attempt to split.

It also means that it is relatively easy to disassemble should I want to.

As ever I was far more excited about making it, than the thought of writing about making it. So I failed to take any in-progress pictures.

Hmm last picture is a bit rubbish, but it’s taken me 2 weeks to get as far as adding pictures to this post, so it will have to do.