• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Pole lathe

Sheffield Tony

Sheffield Tony

Nordic Pine
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At least one person asked about the pole lathe in the introdictions thread. Well, that's good enough excuse for me !

I hope you weren't expecting the hand hewn from a tree thing of great beauty sort ! It was made in an enthusiastic hurry to get turning, so with plenty of compromises and that intention all bodgers have of making a proper one one day. The main constraint was it had to be dead easy to break down and chuck in the car. It also had to be made out of wood from my FIL's old window frames and some stuff from the skip at work.

So here are most of the bits, in transportation mode.
lathe-1.jpg

Together, the legs fit into a wide V notch to stop them racking too much. This is in the Great Barn at Wimpole Hall. You see the other compromise, the "goal posts" and bungee. Though I have used a genuine pole to provide the spring return, they are really quite a pain. You need a fresh cut sapling - it dries out and loses it's spring over time. You can't fix it down on hard standing, or indoors, nor will they let us knock pegs into the archeologically sensitive areas of the site outside. And finally, it gets in the way of allowing visitors to get close enough to see what you're doing without inevitably bashing one on the head with the pole !
lathe-2.jpg

Me doing some suburban garden bodging,
bodging.jpg

This is what I was making. It is part of the back of a chair. Also a lot of skew chisel practice ;)
turnings-1.jpg
 
Great stuff and a sensible compromise for the modern world.
If you live in the woods, a sapling makes sense but most of us don't.

I have had a go at using a pole lathe. A few years back I had a magical weekend away at Clisset Wood in Herefordshire. The workshop there is in the open air, under an awning. It was a warm midsummer. And everything came together at once. Great fun, a fantastic mix of like minded people, the birdsong, the sunlight, the traditions and techniques.

When such things are possible again, I recommend it to any woodworker. Even if you don't want it to take over your life, a bit of green woodworking is good for you.
 
So this requires you to use both hands and a foot? I find turning difficult enough when the machine is powered by electrickery. You can take this hand tools thing too far you know 8-)

(Turning looks very neat btw. )
 
The tricky bit - to me at least - is not so much having to treddle with one foot, but the fact that on the return stroke, the work rotates backward. You must back off the tool a little from the work, or the reverse rotation tends to lift the tool off the rest making a catch very likely on the next treddle stroke. You have to get into the rhythm.
 
I've made one a couple of times, very much like that using a bungie cord. The first one I thought I could improve by gearing it up. I did it so that others could learn from my mistakes......so I can tell you, gearing up a pole lathe isn't a great idea. :lol: :lol:

That's seriously nice spindle work, I must say.
 
Thanks for posting that. I know the real meaning of bodging and also the alternative and those spindles are far from a bodged job.
 
Another project for the list. The kids made some candlesticks for their Nan at a Christmas market the other winter and really enjoyed it. My lathe is just sat in the corner waiting for me to put it back it back together and spend some money on it, this looks way more fun.
 
Hi Tony, thanks for indulging us, would love to have a go sometime. How do you source your Greenwood? And for small pieces could you use tree limbs or does it always have to be the trunk, do you go right back to basics with a froe ( I think it’s called) and mallet to split the wood down? Ian
 
AndyT":4pi19fp9 said:
Great stuff and a sensible compromise for the modern world.
If you live in the woods, a sapling makes sense but most of us don't.

I have had a go at using a pole lathe. A few years back I had a magical weekend away at Clisset Wood in Herefordshire. The workshop there is in the open air, under an awning. It was a warm midsummer. And everything came together at once. Great fun, a fantastic mix of like minded people, the birdsong, the sunlight, the traditions and techniques.

When such things are possible again, I recommend it to any woodworker. Even if you don't want it to take over your life, a bit of green woodworking is good for you.
Click to expand...

Hi Andy, so agree with you, your course sounds pretty idyllic, I did one 10? years ago at West Dean College in Sussex, we started off with wet green oak with the bark on and split it down, but we used an indoor setting with electric lathes so not quite so rural as yours. We also steam bent the hoop for the back, the only bit we didn’t make was the seat which was supplied as a square blank. From memory it was a three day course, the expert and 5 of us novices, as you say an interesting mix of people, luckily we were all quite proficient woodworkers, I think it would’ve been a stretch for somebody just thinking it was a good course to go on without any experience. and we each took home a very nice Windsor chair. Most enjoyable. Ian
 
Hmm. Sourcing green wood is a growing problem. Mostly I used to get it from Wimpole NT estate, our APTGW local group met there until recently, and the forester there was one of us. Something always needed reducing a bit ...

Things have changed though. The NT have got tight fisted and wanted us to pay them for the right to meet there. The forester has taken redundancy. The group is upping sticks (!) and relocating to Burwash manor, who seem grateful to have us, but are further away for me, and I'm not sure of the wood supplies. I would love to get wood from one of the more local parks departments. Will have to work on that one. The spindles in the picture came from the trunk of a big ash tree in SIL's garden. Branch wood isn't great for spindles because of the stresses.

And yes, the starting point for a chair is a ~1m log - from there on it is all hand tools. Wedges and sledgehammer, froe, axe, drawknife, lathe. I did put a WIPs of the process of making a few chairs (with various levels if detail) on the other place. Hopefully there will be more to come ...

Just spotted your chair. That's a lot better than many a first greenwood chair ! Very good.
 
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