Ive been working quite a bit with green wood recently so I have a nice stack of split wood ready to be worked. A friend of mine is letting me use his lathe. I have really been struggling to learn to use the machine, but I did finally turn out a stretcher. My brother had the idea to do a burnt wood finish. We burnt the wood and then finished it off with a coat of linseed oil. I am pleased with the results, and I will be exploring these techniques more in the future.
As I mention in the video the wood is from a friend of mine who live in the next town over from me. I cut a few hackberry trees off of her lot. It was quite a lot of wood so I made and sold a few bar stools with this and then I split the rest and painted the ends.
I have been working mostly with a shave horse and a drawknife to shape the wood but a woodworker friend of mine suggested to me that I learn to turn. It just happened that a friend of mine had a lathe sitting around that he is willing to let me borrow and use indefinitely.
Learning to turn is challanging. In the begging I had a few pieces of wood flying through the air very near to my face. When I say a piece of wood I pretty much mean a small pecan log. No harm done. One major advancement was aquiring a set of roughing gouges. These are large chisels in the shape of a U with a long sturdy handel. Without this any work on the lathe is not possible.
This last weekend my brother, my father, and I decided to give turning a try with the right tool for the job. I mounted the piece of pecan that had formly been flying through the air and roughed it from an oval like cylender to an actual round piece of wood. I had just broken the cheap handle for my other roughing gouge so we decided to turn this piece into a handel.
Then my dad wanted to mount a piece that I had split out of the hackberry tree, and so using a centerfinder I marked the centers and mounted the piece. My brother came and roughed nearly to a cylender, and then I took it down the rest of the way. Then because of my interest in making chairs I decided to make a chair stretcher. So I took the piece way down and gave it a nice curve.
At this point my brother wanted to do a burnt wood finish. I got out a torch, we lit it, and burnt the stretcher while turning on the lathe. This type of finish worked especially well. I would not have thought to do this if it was not for my brother. I will use this technique in the future on full pieces of furniture.
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