Bryan Milham came to us armed with an apparently random collection of, by his own admission, offcuts from his scrap bin to show that you did not need a big piece of wood to make something, it uses up small pieces and can be a skill builder as mistakes are not costly. His aim was to make a small sewing stand – a home for a pincushion, thimbles, scissors and other sewing accessories. This involved a great number of woodturning techniques so was an excellent basis for a demo to a club with amateur turners of varied skills and interests.
Bryan styles himself as The Village Woodturner which is unduly modest. He points out that, back before plastics, everyone used to have far more wooden items, collectively known as treen, and that they’d have been made by the local turner, a member of a Liveried Guild. He likes to keep the craft alive by teaching and finds a ready market for hand turned items from lace bobbins and thimbles up to newel posts and sets of matching balusters for stairs.
It’s always interesting to see different turners’ approaches to tool selection. Bryan, an engineer at heart, makes his own swan-neck hollowing tools, an ingenious live centre for which he can make support for anything he needs (details at the end) and coving gouge – just a tool steel rod (old screwdriver) ground at 45 degrees, with a small reverse grind to provide the cutting edge – also sanding pads made from MDF sheet with hook-and-loop material which can guarantee a flat bottom to a bowl. All very practical and inexpensive.
Before starting, Bryan stressed that he was wearing safety glasses and shoes with steel toecaps. As amateurs we aren’t subject to industrial safety laws but shouldn’t take unnecessary risks.
On to the actual demo. Bryan started with the beech spindle that would be the centre of the stand. He used a skew to gave it a curvaceous profile that would look and feel good. He stressed that you should always be sure to use the lower half of the skew, towards the heel and in line with the contact with the toolpost, to prevent damaging and potentially dangerous catches where the tool suddenly shoots off.
Unfortunately, when it came to forming the tenon to fit into the base, he found that our lathe tailstock wasn’t accurately centred, so the tenon became too small. Sorry, Bryan. We've fixed it now.
Next were the two identical arms that stick out for hanging scissors on. Bryan showed how you can use the edge of a strip of card or wood to transfer pencil marks from the first one you make to the second to ensure they are exactly the same dimensions. Such a strip is known as a ‘story stick’ or ‘story board’ and Bryan uses them whenever making identical stair balusters.
After these, Bryan took a small block of sapele and fashioned it into the pincushion section to go on top of the shaft. Apparently, pincushions were once stuffed with ground walnut shells, but we made do with wadding inside the velvet casing.
The last essential piece was the oak base, pre-drilled for the aforementioned tenon. As with all the other pieces, Bryan mounted this in a suitable 4 jaw chuck. He turned it to round with a bowl gouge as a faceplate turning, then refined the shape with his favourite tool – the skew.
The base had 5 brass posts for thread bobbins and a wooden thimble stand. Bryan also made a thimble of purpleheart – a South American hardwood that turns purple when cut. He didn’t sand the top as you want a thimble to have a rough surface and suggested that a small texturing tool could improve on this. A thimble is about as small an item as many of us would attempt to make. It just goes to show that even a tiny off-cut may come in useful one day.
Lastly, Bryan had prepared a sandwich of two strips of lacewood (London plane) with 6mm MDF glued in the middle. His intent was to turn the bundle to round, then remove the MDF and re-glue the two wood pieces together. With a little sanding of the join this would form an oval sectioned tube which would make a fine needle case. Luck ran out, though, and the glued bundle flew apart. In real life this wouldn’t be a disaster, but it was nearly 10pm, when the lathe turns into a pumpkin.
Bryan has provided photographs of the finished sewing stand and needle-case, so club members can see the fully finished items.
So, many thanks to Bryan for a most enjoyable and thought-provoking evening. He shows that you don’t need to buy every tool on the market, can make a huge variety of items on your lathe and shouldn’t throw away scraps because you never know when you’ll need them.
Details of the Live Centre
If you saw the demo and want to copy Bryan’s wooden live centre, he’s kindly sent details.
2MT ¾” x 16 tpi(or 14mm x 1)Threaded Live Centre
from RDG Tools: https://www.rdgtools.co.uk
¾” x 16 (or14mm x 1) Bolt or threaded rod and several matching nuts
Cut the head off the bolt, if used.
To make any shape of live centre, put a suitable piece of wood such as a short cylinder in your chuck, drill a shallow clearance hole for the ¾” or 14mm nut on one end and glue a nut into it.
Remove from the chuck, screw the threaded rod into the nut, add a second nut to lock on the first, put the threaded rod into a chuck. You can now turn the wood into any shape required.
To use this as a live centre, take it out of the chuck and screw it into the threaded live centre. You can make several and swap between them easily.
Thanks to Bryan Milham thevillagewoodturner@gmail.com