The Hiatus is Over!

[egnald]

Hello all and greetings from Nebraska.

As the subject says, the hiatus is finally over. I finally cleaned off my work surfaces, put tools away, and made something on the lathe! It's been over 6-months. Sometime around July 2022 I under turned a Sonoran Desert Ironwood cabochon intended as the finial insert on one of Smitty's Pen Works Caballero kits from Ed at Exotic Blanks. The CA finish chipped off on one side when I pressed the cabochon into the finial. I decided to turn a new cabochon and glued up a similar piece of Ironwood ready to turn.

However, ever since that fateful day, I have had the rest of the Ironwood chucked up and ready to turn, but just haven't been in the mood. The mandrel, bushings, and blanks are still on the lathe, but I finally decided it was time to do something. The something wound up being a new beer faucet handle turned from a 1-inch piece of Bocote I had laying out. I think it was a good project to help get me back in the swing of things since it required a lot of lathe processes.

I mounted my pen drilling jaw chuck and jacobs chuck on the lathe in order to drill a hole in the end of the blank. Then I swapped the jacobs chuck out for a tailstock sliding tap holder to tap 3/8-16 threads into the blank. Then I switched the headstock out for an ER32 collet holder and 1/2-inch collet to hold a bottle stopper mandrel (the stoppers use a 3/8-16 thread just like faucet handles). After turning, I finished the handle by sanding from 240 up to 7000 grit using Doctor's Woodshop Walnut oil as a sanding lubricant, followed by 4 coats of Doctor's Woodshop Pens Plus, and a final coat of Doctor's Woodshop Microcrystalline Wax. I think it turned out pretty good.

This weekend, perhaps I will get back to it and finish up that Ironwood Caballero. (A full set of faucet handles are also in order too, but I need to start out with a bigger blank so I can exaggerate the taper more -- it's hard to even see that there is a tapered shape in the photos).

Thumbnails Attached (Click for Larger Picture)


Regards,
Dave

 

[KMCloonan]

Looks good. The handle looks like a good warm-up.

Good luck with the caballero - I am just now finishing a Diamond Knurl with custom finial and center band, but I messed up the center band enough that I could not use it, and to make matters worse, I only had a small chunk of the resin left over, and I ruined it. So I had to scrounge for a similar chunk of a slightly different color for the center band and finial. We'll see how it turns out. Sometimes it seems like those two ornamentations, as small and simple as they look, take up more time than the entire rest of the pen. But it's cool when they turn out well.

 

[Wmcullen]

I hear you. My creative motivation gets supercharged when I clean up my workspace. I think it sometimes gets buried under a pile of planks, tools and sandpaper. ; ) Cullen

 

[tgsponge1]

Congrats for getting back at it! I get that way myself every now and then.