Mounting a bowl blank Once you have shaped the outside of your blank, a collet chuck will enable you to attach the bottom to the headstock of the lathe for hollowing out the inside. This chuck is similar in operation to the contracting-jaw scroll chuck. To prepare a blank for the chuck, turn a dovetailed [...]

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Setting up the chuck The pin chuck allows you to mount a bowl blank on the lathe headstock quickly at the cost of drilling a relatively large hole in your workpiece. The chuck consists of two parts: a shaft with a flat wedge milled out of it and a roller pin that fits into the [...]

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The jig shown at right will enable you to use a router for cutting flutes on your lathe turnings. Cut the pieces of the jig from 3/4-inch plywood, except for the top, which is made from 1/4-inch clear acrylic. The jig should be long and wide enough to support your router’s base plate, and high [...]

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Marking out the reeds Outline reeds on a turning blank using your lathe’s indexing head as you would mark flutes. You can use a layout jig or the tool rest. With the lathe unplugged and the indexing pin in the head, position the rest parallel to the blank and raise it so the top of [...]

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Outlining the flutes Use the lathe’s indexing head and a shop-made layout jig to mark the flutes on your blank. For the jig, attach the upright to the base piece at a 90″ angel. Bore a hole through the upright to hold a pencil tip level with the middle of the blank when the base [...]

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Gluing up the blank To prepare a blank for a split turning, cut the piece oversize. If you will be splitting the turning in two, as for the pair of bell-shaped bookends, saw the blank in half. For quarter columns, like those shown in the photo above, rip the blank into four equal pieces (inset). [...]

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By mounting a leg blank on the lathe off-center, wood turners can create turnings such as the cabriole leg shown above made from zebra wood. 1:Marking the “off” center Mount your leg blank between true centers on the lathe, then use a skew chisel to make a shoulder cut on the piece. defining the square [...]

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