Experimenting with cherry, pear and boxwood

New wood and a drawing

On 27 October the new set of turning tools, the cherry and pear, and the boxwood arrived. While sorting through all my clutter I found fifty or so small files lying among it as well.

I’m building the wheel from a drawing, from which the dimensions are also derived. The spokes do need to be a little thicker: according to the drawing they would be about 0.8 mm at my scale, and that simply breaks far too easily. So I make them 1 mm thick. Erik B looked at the drawing more closely than I did: on it, the spokes run right through the wheel, or else you need four rims. I had never looked at that detail in the bottom right. At my scale that gets too small, so I make a single rim with a notch: the spoke lies flush with the rim on the inside and drops slightly into the wheel on the outside. The stanchions are presumably in the kit in brass, a concern for later.

Stephan warned that such small turned parts get difficult with a chisel; according to him boxwood can be turned down to 0.5 mm without breaking.

Two spokes an evening

Blimey, a bit more work than I thought. After a lot of experimenting I now carve most of each spoke and round it off a little more with a 2 mm wide strip of sandpaper. The spoke at bottom left in the photo doesn’t belong: it has too much detail that I can’t copy properly. Two spokes an evening is slow going. What turns out to be particularly tricky is getting the spokes in a straight line; with these four that worked out reasonably well. In the photo it looks rough, in real life it’s not so bad, and hopefully some varnish will tidy it up. I have experimented with boxwood too, but in that a mistake is made even more quickly. No usable spoke so far.

Stephan thinks the difficulty lies in getting the spokes identical and suggests a jig, like the one he once saw someone use for making belaying pins: the piece of wood turns in a drilled hole with an opening, and through that opening you apply the shape, so the workpiece can’t go anywhere. He referred to Sergey’s method on shipsofscale; a variation is a brass tube with the shape ground out of it. I had tried something like that with a utility knife, without success. I don’t use round stock but square, but who knows. I’ll certainly need patience with this ship’s wheel.