Tool talk: Shop-made tools

The lathe is a very useful machine tool. But it needs months of learning of the machine, its tools and also the wood. We have been helped by many in our journey of learning how to use one. One of the main aspects of the lathe are the chisels or gouges that are used to cut the wood - the turner's art. Strictly speaking, this post is for the turners, so I will request our readers to excuse all the techinical details! The reason for documenting these is to share our learning with other people who might benefit from it.

Mr Stephen King from the Bruderhof community was visiting us the day we got our lathe back in 2022. He helped us make some improvised chisels using files- he recommended used ones but since we didn't have one, we bought a new file and shaped it into a chisel. Here's a photo of Stephen and Ashish with the chisel we made.

The next big step was the skew chisel. The blade was from HSS stock, purchased as a parting tool, which we shaped into a skew. The handle was an old rolling pin, partly burnt maybe at the stove and discarded. It is beautiful, and a joy to hold and use.

Since we felt the need for a heavier and more stable skew, we made one from a large file, but this one loses its edge too soon- possibly we overheated it while cutting and grinding it. Below is a photo of Budhu who made it. Hopefully one of these days we can carefully grind away the overheated portion.

The third skew we did was with HSS stock (M35 HSS) and a beautiful hardwood handle. Not knowing how to turn a handle with a rectangular hole at one end, We just carved it by hand. It is unusual in it's square cross-section, but will not roll off the lathe bed. I have high expectations from this one, considering the metal used. Below are some pictures of this skew chisel and how we made it.

The best and most rewarding tool to make was definitely the bowl gouge. Why a bowl gouge for a team that does not focus on bowl turning? Well, we use this one for roughing spindles. It is an alternative to the spindle roughing gouge that we do not have. The bowl gouge is used as the first step in making dowels from square batons of wood. And it does the job beautifully! The spindles are then used to make wheels for our products.

This gouge was made from a stock of 20mm dia. file. We got the file cheap from a scrap dealer, and it is proving to be a good find indeed- the metal is hard, and holds its edge very well. We just need to avoid overheating it while shaping.

The profile of the bowl gouge was a challenge to understand without a sample, but it was a great tool to learn.

Here are some images to show how it was made. Not shown are the use of a flex-shaft die grinder with some smaller diameter stone to grind the flute.

We have (quite ambitiously) bought some HSS blanks to further try new lathe tools- The next has to be a spindle gouge, and probably a smaller skew for turning details on the carousels.

All of this turning talk would not be appropriate if we did not post something we have turned, so here is an image of a finished Village Carousel turning (pun intended)!