Rifleman1776
Member
How to trim and square blanks before turning seems to be a recurring theme here. In the past I have responded that I square on my disk sander and that has been just fine for me. But others have pointed out that square in relation to the sides of an unturned blank has nothing to do with making the ends perfectly perpendicular to the tube. While my finished product has been suitable in my eyes I did change things a bit today. Can't ever fine tune technique enough. Squaring with the sides of the blank is (sorta) OK because you turn using the tube as the center axis and that does more squaring. But today it dawned on me (I'm kina slow sometimes) that I usually end up using the hand held trimmer to remove glue from the tubes before mounting on the mandrel. So I asked my self, "Self, while trimmer is in your hand and you are using it on the glued blanks, why not finish trim too?" Self couldn't find a reason why not. So that's what I did. And, on several (I was doing a batch) it did take shavings and give a final, more perfect, squaring. Every few years I get past the stubborn and learn something. []