Understanding a Starter Set of Lathe Chisels | Woodworkers Guild of America

I really enjoy working on the lath and a question I get from a lot of Woodworkers is when they’re getting started what makes up a good starter set of Lathe chisels for spindle work and what do each of those chisels do so great opportunity here to give you that information we’re going to go through each of them and first I’m going to show you the profiles so you understand what they look like and then we’ll see the cuts they actually make on this chunk of Walnut I’ve got in the lathe here so first off let’s talk about a roughing gouge this is a roughing gouge now chisels are indicated by their size so this is a 1-in roughing gouge the distance across those Corners they get bigger not too much smaller than this but as you’re shopping for a roughing gouge this is a pretty good size to start with here is a conventional spindle gouge this would be a 1in spind gouge again measured across the width of it from kind of corner to corner out here round on the end beveled on the back and then similarly we’ll look at another spindle gouge profiles the same bevel’s the same but smaller so it let you do more detailed work this is a 3/8 spindle gouge and then our friend the skew skew is just a word for anything that’s at an angle so the tip of this chisel has been skewed with that angle beveled on both sides and again we’re indicated here by width this is a one-inch skew you can get them narrower you can get them wider but this is a great starter size and a parting tool parting tools have kind of a funky tip on them they come to a v then there’s also this r raised area on each side here and it has to have that you’ll see why when we use it to make our Cuts parting tools are very commonly used in conjunction with calipers they really work hand in hand so we’ll have a look at what those two do together now what we’ll do is we’ll get this turned round and then once it’s round we’ll go through each of those chisels and what they do need to have face protection on when you’re working on the lathe love a face shield for this as opposed to goggles because it gives my whole face protection from the junk flying off of here we’ll start out with the roughing gouge roughing gouges are used whoops that’s not a roughing gouge that’s a roughing gouge roughing gouges are used to get the blank from Square to round and we are good to go now I think you can see with the roughing gge we’re making pretty short work of that spindle we’re getting it down to round pretty darn fast I’m going to come down here and work on this end bring my tool rest in closer because we’ve reduced the diameter and we’ll finish her up when I lay the Chisel on there I’m checking for round if it still bounces you’ve got corners or flat spots if it doesn’t bounce you’re round now if you don’t have a roughing gouge in your starter kit that’s okay you can do the work I just did there with a conventional spindle gouge you want to use a wide one like this 1 in let me show you that cut now the deal with roughing out is that we’ve got a surface here that isn’t great it’s round but it doesn’t look real nice so one way we can fix that is to go to our skew and the way we use the skew is just simply flat against the spindle everything I’m showing you here is with a scraping action shearing would change things a lot we’re not going to cover that in this clip but we’ll talk about using a shearing technique to level out all these high and low spots left behind by the gouges so one application of our skew is leveling a spindle once we’ve got it roughed out another one is to make beads those are high spots or external profiles that we want to put onto a spindle like this so I’ll start up by just marking out some bead locations let’s do one there let’s do one there and the way that we’ll use the skew for this is put the tip of the skew into the material sweep across tip of the skew in sweep across refine the shape let’s do it again over here tip sweep so two big things with the skew leveling the work and making beads like I made right there now that gives us an external what about an internal well if only we had something that was round on the tip so with our gouge start doing the same thing we can Mark out where we want a Cove or an internal to go and then really we’re just transferring the shape of the gouge to the material the benefit to that smaller gouge I showed you is that we could do a narrower Cove and of course that big gouge that I had initially wouldn’t even fit in there so it’s handy to have a couple different sizes of gouges parting tool can do a couple different things for you in a parting action we would use a parting tool a lot to establish something at a specific diameter so what I would do is I would set my calipers to some size that I need to produce in my spindle then The Parting tool gets used on edge like this to make a Groove kind of a cut in our spindle blanket and then we’ll test a little bit of a cut a little bit of a test once the calipers slip on with these two working together we know we’ve turned that to a specific diameter the other thing that you can do with a parting tool is do a little bit of decoration by using it instead of on its Edge use it flat ways bring the tip in and see how I made that V cut we can widen it a little bit by Swinging The Parting tool so in a common set of spindle turning chisels you may or may not have the roughing gouge here but the skew a gouge preferably a large and a small and a parting tool these four tools are going to get you really far in your spindle turning and again parting tool in conjunction with a set of calipers will let you turn specific diameters like that this gives you an understanding of the tools what they do how they do it and what you need to add to your shop so that you can get started on spindle turning …

“+10,000 Step By Step Plans …even if you don’t have a large workshop or expensive tools!“ Download Today! 👈