Learn Wood Lathe Basics: Beginner's Guide #woodworking #woodturning

well we're not going to be spinning like that today but hopefully we'll be turning some wood

welcome to Flyn dog woodwork today we're going to look at my latest shop edition of wood lathe

so let's take a look at this tool and see if we can learn how to use it so I literally have no

experience with a wood lath never had one lesson however it is something that I've wanted to get

into since I first started Woodworking and one of the reasons why I haven't purchased a lathe until

now is because these tools are fairly expensive and I wanted to do more than just turn a pen and

from my limited experience of looking at lays that seems to be how they're priced the more

capacity the more you're going to spend so what did I do well you guessed it I Googled deep and

I found a wood lathe that's 14x 40 in with with a half horsepower for just over $200 and if you have

any experience with wood laths you'll know that you just can't purchase the lathe itself you're

going to need some chisels and this lathe comes with three chisels included yeah Dizzle I'm about

to bounce to the spizzle and get a 40 Isel then I'll be at my baby mles Shel so who makes this

lathe well let's go check it out so inside this box is the vever 14x 40 half horsepower lathe

let's unbox this and see what's inside so my first impression with this tool is this thing is massive

this should be able to accommodate me for a long period of time without having to upgrade assuming

it suits my needs you'll also notice the chisels in back the instructions as well as a few pieces

here that we're going to assemble so let's do that next now one thing you'll notice in this

time lapse is I keep on referring to the paperwork that came with this machine and there's a reason

for that because I found the paperwork just a little bit confusing well I finally got this thing

assembled and a couple notes about the assembly the first thing is it's really nice because they

provide you all the tools you need to get this thing assembled the second note is there are

actually no instructions on how to assemble this now there are things like this parts diagram and

instructions on how to use the tool but there's no direct instructions but I was able to assemble

it and as I said before I have no experience with laths so it's really not that difficult

so now that we have this thing assembled let's go over some of the basic physical components of

this machine first off in the front of the machine you'll see the on andof switch and this does have

a safety lock on the side of the machine is where the pulley mechanism is and this is held together

with a bolt if we open it up you can see that this is a four-speed machine this machine will go 810

RPM 1180 RPM 1700 RPM and 2480 RPM if we take a look at the front of the lathe you can see the

tool rest and this tool rest can be moved up and down with just a Twist of this knob you can also

move the tool rest left and right by twisting the knob on bottom to loosen it to the left and

tighten it down to the right if we take a look at the spindle driver you'll notice there's a little

screw here and this comes with two attachments let me show you what those are the first attachment

is the face plate and this is perfect when dealing with larger pieces of wood you screw

your workpiece directly into this face plate and you can turn things like Bowls the second

piece has four little Spurs on it and this is for smaller items this is per perfect for things like

spindles the last piece that I want to show you on this tool is the tail stock assembly this has

a freely rotating head on it with a point on the very end once you have your workpiece installed in

the lathe you cinch it down with this little knob in the back and this tail stock assembly moves in

the same fashion as the tool Rest by turning the snob to the left you can loosen it up so that you

can move the assembly wherever you want once you're happy with the position you can lock it

down by turning to the right well that's about it for the physical components of this machine

now I want to get into some of the fun stuff which is to turn something for the very first

time and I'm sure I'm going to make some mistakes along the way so if you have some experience with

turning leave a comment and let me know how I can improve my skills I know more than you all right

so one of the first things that I want to do is to make sure that that lathe is completely stable so

I'm going to clamp this lathe down in a number of spots just to make sure that it doesn't move on me

now that I have my lathe clamped up and it's quite secure I'm now going

to grab my workpiece and in this case I'm going to use some Pine

4x4 look John it's red pine they were going to put Fleck lolium over this beautifully

preserved naughty Red Pine most people in this world John are ass and the main

reason that I want to use pine is because it's quite soft and since I've never turned

before I want to use a material that's not going to put off a whole lot of resistance

so the first thing that I want to do is to find the exact center on both sides

of this 4x4 and I'll do this by connecting the lines on the diagonals of each of the

corners now that I have my centers marked on both sides of the 4x4 I now want to take my

piece with the Spurs on it and I want to take the very very tip of this and align it with the

very center of that wood so just like you would with a forer bit I'll put the point of the spur

piece right in the center of that wood once I have it in lined I can tap it down with a

hammer this is our new uh electric Hammer I'm going to plug it in and let you see how it

works okay this this is this is a whole lot easier than the old fashioned way folks with

a spurred piece directly in the center of my wood I can now take my workpiece and screw it onto my

lathe now I can tighten down the spur piece to the lathe using the included wrenches now that we have

our workpiece attached to the motor of the lathe we now need to attach our tail stock assembly to

our workpiece and to do this we'll simply line the tip of our tail stock assembly to the center of

our work piece and tighten it down now that I have my workpiece attached to my lathe it's now time

to set up my tool rest and here I have my tool rest set up so it's completely parallel with the

workpiece and there's no interference between the tool rest and the workpiece itself with everything

set up it's now time to take a look at some of the chisels we'll be using to carve down this

wood so these are the three chisels that come with this lathe you have a gouge chisel a skew

chisel as well as is a parting chisel now it's my understanding that the gouge chisel is one of the

most commonly used chisel when doing wood turning this is used to smooth out rough stock and it's

also used to do round overs The Parting chisel which has a vshape on the very end is used for

setting diameters as well as scraping and finally the skew chisel is commonly used to cut v's and

Beads as well as to do your finished cuts on your turning but these aren't the only turning tools

that I purchased for this lathe as I noticed a lot of turning tools have a different design and these

are the extra tools that I purchased and you can see their chisels the difference however is they

have reversable and replaceable tips you can see there's a parting chisel a skew chisel as well as

two gouge chisels and I think I'm really going to like these tools as they have a very Hefty

construction and I'll be assured that they'll always be sharp either by replacing the blade

or simply reversing it but for this video we're going to stick with what comes in the box so

let's not waste any time and make our first Cuts with this lathe so our first cuts are going to

be made with a gouge tool and I've got my lathe set up to 810 RPMs which is its slowest setting

and what I'm going to do for this First Cut Is to slowly go back and forth resting my index finger

right up against that tool rest this should slowly cut away the edges until we get a round surface

before we get to cutting however I did want to mention a couple of safety items that I'll be

wearing while doing this turning let me show you what those are so first and foremost is this Max

view face shield let's unbox this and I'll show you what it's all about so the nice thing about

this face shield is it has an anti-fog mask and I wore this around the house a little bit yesterday

yep that's exactly what happened and this thing doesn't fog at all the other nice thing about this

safety Shield is it works just like a welder's mask you can lift it up and get it out of your

way when it's not in use lastly this mask can accommodate almost any size head just by twisting

this knob to tighten it up or loosen it up now that will protect my eyes and my face but it won't

protect my lungs and that's why I'll be wearing a dust mask so let's get started and power up this

lathe so one of the first things that you'll notice as I trim down this piece

of wood is that the tool rest is moving this is something that I struggled with

when I initially started off with this tool what I found is that you really

need to clamp down that screw that holds the tool rest in place for it to be secure

so after using the gouge for a bit I can say that these chisels don't come

very sharp however they are sharpenable so that's something I'm going to work on

in the meantime I'm going to switch over to those other chisels and see how they

work and that is an absolute world of difference so I'm going to continue on with these other

chisels until we get this thing rounded off so as I continue to pair this wood down I'm

really enjoying how well these new chisels are working as the wood becomes more round

chiseling becomes much easier this is because there's less resistance from those corners

and all I'm doing here is chiseling for a bit stopping the lathe and checking for my

progress so I finally got this workpiece rounded off with my gouge now let's take

a look at it and I'll show you what it looks like and here you can see that 4x4 now has a

round shape right in the middle of it now one thing that I noticed once I got closer

and closer towards that round shape that gouge became much more easy to use but I also want

to try out some of these other tools and since we're starting off with a round shape I think

I want to make a wooden Mallet that I can use in my shop so what I'm going to do next is to grab

my parting tool and Mark out where I'm going to place a handle so the first thing that I'm

going to do is to take my pencil and Mark out the start and the stop of where I want my handle to

be now that I've done that I'm going to grab my parting tool and what I'm going

to do now is to take The Parting tool and reduce the diameter where I struck

those lines what I'm looking for here is a handle that's approximately 1 and 1/2 in

thick now now that I have those lines marked

out I'm now going to go back to the gouge and reduce that

diameter so here I'm just going back and forth between The Parting tool and the

gouge so that I can get the diameter of this handle exactly how I want

it

so now that we've used The Parting tool and the gouge tool I'm now going to try to use out

the skew tool this tool should help me smooth out all those rough edges before we move on to

sanding

so now that I have this rough shape turned out on

this lathe I'm now going to take some sandpaper just to smooth it out just a

tad now that we've done some sanding let's take a closer look at our first attempt at using this

lathe and this by no means is a final product however it is a good look at some of the Form and

Function functionality of this lathe and here's a look at our rough product as you can see it turned

out quite smooth for the Mallet head as well as the handle now if I were to continue on with this

I would cut off the top and the bottom and then we would have the completed Mallet so I'm quite

pleased with the form and functionality of this Lathe for my first turning project this turned out

okay and that's all I was looking for I obviously have a lot more to learn but this was a great

experience in my first time working with to lathe and all the tools that come with it and for just

under $200 I think this is a great opportunity for somebody that wants to get into wood turning but

isn't quite sure they want to spend a whole lot of money now there are a couple of items that I'm a

little bit concerned about with this lathe first and foremost is the tool rest when I was turning

the wood the tool rest came loose a couple of times I had to stop the lathe and tighten down

the tool rest so that's something on this La that I'm either going to upgrade or make sure that I

spend extra extra special attention to every single time I use this tool the second thing

is that the tools that came with this lathe aren't sharp at all so when you get this slthe you should

expect to have to spend some time sharpening these tools and that's why I personally think

it's worth upgrading to some specialty tools so that you won't be frustrated once you start

working with this tool but all in all I think this lathe is great value for the money especially if

you're just starting out like me well thanks for joining me today on my first attempt at working

with a lathe I know I did didn't do everything perfect and I'm sure you'll let me know how I

can improve if you haven't already make sure you hit that subscribe button leave a like and

leave a comment it really does help out this small woodworking Channel until next time take care as

[Music]

always