An Introduction to Green Woodwork - Part 4: The Pole Lathe

so this is a traditional pole lathe it consists of a whole framework made out of wood there's a few bits of metal work in there as well bolts and these cranks for the Centers for the rest of it is constructed from wood these are actually made out of oak the lower parts obviously where they're in contact with the ground so that they're a bit more durable and the rest of the construction is actually made out of ash the legs themselves have got this adjustable what we call a Manx leg just construction so it's got this very strong triangle and you'll also notice that they're both splayed out quite a lot as well that's just to give a lot of stability so even on uneven ground like we were on on this grass down the field so it's pretty undulating but even that will sit nice and firm you've got the single bed construction so there is two different designs there's a double bed system with the poppets drop into it this is actually a single bed construction so it's quite light it's very good for transporting around for shows and things like that because the puppets themselves actually stay fixed onto the bed of the lathe I've actually got this set up with wingnut so I don't even need a span and I can pretty much take it down and it will fit in the back of the Land Rover no problem the puppets themselves have got a simple wooden wedge to hold them in place and they're pretty much fully adjustable this has only got a relatively short bed so we are slightly limited to how long a piece of timber we can turn between the centres but to be honest over-over sort of 36 inches you will probably find that a single bed lathe will actually start to flex anyway so that's the pretty much the construction of the lathe itself we've got a very simple tool rest that we rest that chisels and our hands onto we've got this adjustable crank end that will take up any slack so we can fit in various lengths of pieces of timber we've got some very simple little wooden wedges that work to hold the tool rest away and the major thing that I like on mine is to put a pin through so that the tool rest stays fixed and it won't keep moving around especially if you're gonna be marking out in detail four sets of legs and things like that some simple rubber bands keep the tool rest slightly spring-loaded as well so they keep these adjustable wrists in place that works really well the Warner addition that I've got on here is a simple hole that I've drilled in there which is my oil well so we will use oil for lubricating the center's stop a piece of wood squeaking when it's mounted so I've got a simple little oil well there which works really nicely the whole package itself will flat pack really nice you can set it up indoors obviously we are outdoors at the moment and if you are using it indoors then you don't necessarily have to use the pole like it's traditionally set up with you can actually use either uprights or even just in your roof space if you're in your garage of using a bungee just like you'd use for on a trampoline things like that so some bungee strap works really well personally I really like the fluid movement you get with the pole you get a much nicer movement you get plenty of strength but you don't get the jerkiness that you would with a bungee this has got a fairly rustic treadle system and it's actually made out of a fork at the hedgerow main I have a piece of hazel and this has actually got this swinging arm mechanism which does make it slightly more sophisticated and allows me to move the string to various parts of the spindle when I'm turning it so I don't have to keep cutting my string so that's the pole lave that's the introduction there are various designs out there you can probably search online for some patterns so that you could make your own but nice and simple but a very effective piece of equipment so we've got our billet prepared it's nice and straight and we've still got a pretty good circle going on there the main thing that we've got to try and do now is try and get it centered onto the pole lathe now the pole lathe itself has two what we call puppets we normally have a fixed puppet that we try and keep in one position and then we have another puppet this end that's actually got a crank so this is the bit that we can tighten and loosen what we can do is we can set this so that it's roughly the length of a piece of wood and you do that by just literally using your piece of wood to knock this little wooden wedge and that allows the puppet to move so you can pretty much move it to any position and then to tighten it you use the same spanner and you hammer that wedge back in so it's very very crude very very simple but that's the thing that I like about it you haven't got to have any fancy spanners or tools with you you can literally use a piece of wood so what we want to try and do is use one of these ends as a bit of a Bradl and we're gonna guesstimate the center of our piece of wood obviously the better the job you've done at making the circle and the easier it is to do so what I tend to do is use one end and I use the tool rest itself as a straight edge as well and what I tend to do is a look straight down and above and I aim to get the middle of the wood and then use that that puppet there's a bit of a crude center and then I turn it 90 degrees and I check to see if I'm still in the middle and if I'm not I can just move over a little bit and find find the center it might take a few attempts a few guesses but with experience you'll get your Orion and what I've also got on this pole lathe and they're tied on so that I don't lose them in the shavings is these little adjustable little steps that hold the tool rest away and I actually springload my tool rest with some rubber bands and that really helps so we just move that a bit further away to make it a little bit easier and I just literally waggle the center into the end of the wood and it's put a little dot little a recess in there now I can do the same on the other end you can use a separate tool like a little gimlet or something like that to make a make a depression but I find that this this works a treat really and it's entirely up to you if you're happy and you're confident that you've got the position right you can just go straight for it if you'll learning I would say the easiest thing to do is just put a little bit of oil on those centers fit the one end and then using the crank in two just take off any excess so that you can get your piece of wood in there then just gently tighten it up and then do half a turn backwards and then what you can do is you can actually give it a spin and I'm using the tool rest again as my sort of straight edge so that I can cite it and I'm looking to see if it's spinning unevenly it's a little bit higher at this point so I'll literally just get my hand and I'll just give it a very gentle tap down and give it another tighten and see if that's taken any of that wiggle out of it that looks pretty good to me so once you're happy make sure you make that hole that Center very obvious and are normally at that stage put a little bit more oil on there now oil you can use you can use anything you can use engine oil you can use chainsaw oil you can use beeswax you can use Stevens soap we've got a little oil whale that we've just got vegetable oil in there the nice thing about using vegetable oil it's a totally sort of biodegradable and if you're using the oil as our finish when you finish your product if you're making rolling pins and things like that it's obviously food safe as well so the next thing we need to do is we need to hook it up to the power source now the power source of a pole lathe is literally a pole a bent pole if you're outdoors this is actually a piece of ash so this has got a real nice flexibility to it it doesn't want to be too floppy some people say old willows very flexible but willow can be a bit too floppy you need something that's got a bit of bit of boying to it a bit of Bounce because what it's going to do is it's got a spinner piece of wood and also lift our treadle up to the highest point so effectively it's going to return our treadle to the top so that we can then push down and make it spinning in the important thing to do is you can actually get this to run in the wrong direction so to get it running correctly you hold the piece of string between you and the piece of wood this is actually a piece of chainsaw cord or mower pull cord and that works really well you could use paracord if that's what you've got and you get this piece of string and then you wrap it not once but twice around that piece of wood so that's engaged the string the pole and the treadle it's connected the two so now what we're gonna do is put it down lock it into that one end that one pop it end and then whine the crank tight and what we might need to do is put in another little step at this end just to keep that tool rest from hitting the piece of wood obviously now we've got a piece of string in there as well if it missed beforehand you might find that that string would actually clutter into the tool wrist and then we'll give it a treadle now you'll find which leg you feel most comfortable on I've always found that I prefer to stand on my right leg holding the baseboard down the treadle board down and then I treadle with my left leg that's just how it feels comfortable have a play around if you can learn to swap around and change that's probably going to be better for your in the long term so that you don't wear one hip out but I find that I'm actually sort of stuck in one position now I find that I can only do it in this this particular orientation so have a few spins see if it's running nicely this is a little bit too springy and the treadles come in a little bit too high up so I can literally just take a wrap off the treadle that's a bit better I can get a full treadle length but it's not sort of feeling too too too resistant and once you're happy that it's spinning correctly we can engage the first chisel now the first chisel that we're gonna use to smooth up this undulated sort of draw knife finish is the roughing out gouge so it's a carving gouge it's particularly sort of flat in section so it's not too much of a d it's almost like a flattened C in shape and the handles on our pole a chisels are quite short compared to peril a chisels that's because we don't need anywhere near as much leverage because we're in control over power it's not like it's gonna jab in and obviously fling the tool out of our hand effectively we do get a dig in then we will just naturally stopped readily now the angle on these is ground again much finer than on apparel a tool rather than it being quite obtuse we've got a really nice fine sort of 30 degree angle on there and we need to match that on to a tall wrist so we're going to be holding the chisel at a comfortable angle like that we wrap our hand around the non sharp part of the metal and we're gonna use the little finger here as effectively like a little depth stop on that tool wrist so you can change your grip until you find that that just just kisses the wood and then holding the end of the handle we can just gradually start to lift up and engage that chisel now the secret with the pole aid is it's a reciprocating lathe so that effectively means the wood is going in one direction and then on the upstroke it's spinning away from us so it's going back and forth effectively and we can only cut on the down stroke so you've got to sort of get into the whole rhythm of it a bit like sort of patting your head and rubbing your stomach and standing on one leg at the same time we've got to learn to engage the chisel when our leg goes down so as an exaggerated form we're literally gonna be taking a chip off treadle goes down we engage the chisel and it's literally gonna be like that but obviously speed it up so feed the chisel into the wood and without too much effort you can see that we start to make little bites it enables like a sort of little little rodent eating a corn on the cob we're going down it just taking little bites and because we've set our little finger onto that tool you can pretty much see that we've gone to the same depth each time and effectively taking it down to the same diameter the whole way along its length and that's a real advantage now problem area obviously we get in our very sharp gouge quite close to a piece of string that will just cut in a second it brings a whole new meaning to the word power cut if that happens so we've got a very high Texas a treadle it's got what we call a swinging arm so I use my foot to kick that treble all over slightly and then with my hand I can just feed the string across the piece of wood so that it moves as well out of the way and then I can continue my cut right through down to the end of the piece of wood now at that stage we can actually start to slide the chisel along you see how we've got these very textured gouge marks and where I've just run it along it's much smoother so using that locked position again once you know the depth you can literally just slide the chisel along knocking up those ridges and the slower you slide your hand across the less-pronounced those little bites will be so you'll end up with a much smoother surface so once I'm happy that I've got that end down to the sort of rough size that I need I'll get the string back over onto that end so that's actually running on a really nice smooth piece of wood you'll also hear how the whole lathe starts to run and I'm much smoother process as well then and I'll probably be able to remove a little bit of these these sort of chalks out the way as well we want to try and keep the tool rest as close to the wood as possible if you can keep the tool rest nice and close you get much less leverage on your chisels therefore you're not gonna get any diggings and things like that so keep that tool rest as close as possible to the end and the whole process is so beautiful we're totally in control we can go as fast as we like we can go as slow as we like and like I say if we dig it in fantastic it's an automatic cut off most modern machineries in the workshop now have this EU law so they've got a stop within I think it's point seven of a second this thing is like instantaneous it's probably the most up-to-date piece of machinery you're gonna ever find even though it's like 2,000 years old in principle so some people would be happy with that that would be the smooth enough finish that they would want they do even leave that sort of textured surface for an actual finish because it looks quite nice make feel what's nice especially if you wanted a grippy handle on say around his back what we'd like to do is then show you the next tool that we'll use to get that totally smooth and that is what we call the flat chisel now this is effectively exactly the same chisel that you would use in the carpentry shop for cutting joints and mortises and stuff like that this is actually a 40 mil former chisel so it's a proper carpentry tool and we've ground it slightly hollow ground and we've got the same sort of 30 degree angle on there now when you're starting out I would actually say that the wider the chisel you can use the better this is 40 mil which I like because it's not too wide and I can use it quite comfortably but if you went for a 50 mil one you'd find that these corners will be further away from the wood and you're less likely to stick it into the into the timber and damage it so position wise we're not gonna hold it square onto the timber we're actually going to hold it at about a 45 degree angle keeping that top corner and that low corner clear of the wood and we're gonna just gradually lift up this back hand until it engages the cuff and the important thing is we've got the bevel side down flat side up and what we're gonna do as soon as we found that it's engaged on the wood we're gonna sort of pick up this little shaving and we're gonna surf it all the way along just like iron in we're gonna push that sort of crease all the way along and off the end and we can control the depth of cut purely by lifting this back hand you'll see that it's slightly frayed here because we were effectively digging in quite deep and we're going slightly uphill up grain but because we're sort of pushing that all the way along it won't matter and because these puppets are made out of wood oh sorry little what do you mean yeah we can just jab the chisel into there and it won't blunt a chisel so if this was like a modern mechanical lathe of metal ends you'd have to be careful you didn't hit your chisel in there so we're just going to continue that cuts again all the way down and same scenario we're gonna keep that treadle over move that string out the way now we thought it'd be fun to show you how to make a chair leg it will pretty much involve all the chisels and obviously the pole lathes really came into its own with the bages up in the woods in the Chilton's who would be making thousands of chair legs from the beech trees for all the chair factories so the pole lathe and chair legs are almost sort of handy hand really so I'm using I'm using the flat chisel just to create a slight taper this is gonna be the tenon end of our of our leg so I've created this slight taper down we can kick the string over and ain't the way we can certainly remove our last little chalk from behind the tool rest and we'll just slightly tighten up that crank you'll find that after a few spins the metal centers will actually start to sit in further into the wood so check that that stays nice and tight if you start to hear this sort of Rumble after a while it means these centers are coming slightly loose so that's pretty good what I've got on here is some very simple little pencil marks that indicate where the pattern is gonna start for a chair leg and to create the pattern we're gonna use what we call a skew chisel this is probably the most complicated of the chisels to use it is double beveled creating sort of like wedge shape like a triangle and the actual tip of the tool is ground at an angle as well and what that allows us to to do is use the what we call the long tip for the detail for cutting in grooves so they're in fibers and marking out where things are going to go and then we use the short corner the lower corner and sort of the main section of the actual flat edge of the tool to actually round things and make things so nice and smooth so when we use the skew chisel to mark out pattern in it's very important that we hold it really secure dead flat onto our tool rest and I'm lining it up with my first pencil mark and I'm gonna go straight in I'm not waggling it side to side and I'm certainly not twisting those bevels into contact with the wood if you do that if you twist the chisel you'll find that it'll dig in and you'll end up with this beautiful spiral that goes down you would it might look pretty but it's not exactly what you're aiming for so set of the fibers now I'm gonna do a traditional three beaded design this is very typical on lots of sort of furniture that you'll see in sort of country pubs and things like that so there's my three sort of beads marked about end and traditionally there'd be a little bead down here as well so you'll notice that I push in when my foot goes down and then I withdraw the tool slightly on the upstroke we don't just leave it stuck in that gap the whole time because you'll find that it will catch just like it did there slightly and bind and pull your tool out the way so that's the fibers tethered now what we do to create a bead is we use that short corner and the important thing is we're gonna aim for the very center of our bead and not remove any material and then we're just gonna roll it round the corner so effectively this part of the tool stays dead flat on for the tool rest and I'm gonna be twisting my wrist here twisting it like a throttle twisting it around and down into that gap so let's give it a try so plenty of speed people get scared of this tool so they start treading very very slowly and it's very important that you keep up the RPM just like so roll it down into that crest and then we'll flip it over so that was the right hand side we're gonna do the left hand side so start in that middle section down into that gap I'm hoping that you're not going to see what happens when the chisel digs in because it makes a real mess real quick so effectively we've said that the fibers with the long corner and we've rounded the rest of it with the short corner of the scooches or so one tool to do what you would think is almost impossible to create with a straight tool something that's very round so what we'll do we've got three to practice on this end so we'll start with this one I'm gonna roll it down into that hole now efficiency I tend to do all those right hand cuts first and then the last one so we've got all those right hand turns done and then we'll do the left hand turn so we'll start on this section down into that bat dip and if you find that you're left with a few little feathers at the bottom it just means that you need to just go carefully in with the tip and just clean up map that little B the fluffiness and you'll notice that I never work from the bottom up I'm always working from the high point down so you're working with the grain direction if you try and work from the bottom up you'll find that you have nothing but trouble and the SKU niche sutures or needs to be very very sharp so after a few beads or a few legs I would stop and I would I would hone this chisel now I'm gonna break the rule is you never go back I just wanted to clean up that last little bit of fluffiness there but ideally you go once and you settle for that it's normally where you go backwards and you try and correct something that's when it goes all horribly wrong so that's our tenon done three beads done we just need to sort out the foot and the rest of the middle leg here which is normally left with a nice thick section for where a stretcher and a holes gonna be drilled in the leg so that's the thickest point but this is reduced down in thickness and you'll find that on all classic Windsor chair legs there will always be a thinning to the leg now that was to allow the leg to actually flex when it was in the finished chair it would allow the chair leg to actually Bend so that chairs in sort of old country houses with uneven floors could actually still sit nice and firm without wobbling so we're going to do that now we don't need to use this chisel but if we don't show you now you won't actually see it in use and that is the spindle gouge now the spindle gouge is a sort of more detailed version of the roughing out gouge so a much tighter radius this is almost like a fingernail grind on here so it can get into very tight spots and you could use this for creating nice little decorative little hollows and you could even use it for removing excess material from detailed areas like this so if you weren't confident with the scooches or you can actually rough out the shape with the spindle gouge first but again always using it from the high point to the low point never the opposite way around so obviously the gouge is pretty self-explanatory you can use it for removing material quickly and also creating those nice those nice dishes and stuff the main tool that I'm going to use again to clean up this area he's gonna be jumping back to the flat chisel and we're gonna start from that high point and I'm just gonna drift in keeping those corners nice and clear and I'll remove a bit of excess material from there if you wanted to you could actually go in there with the gouge first and remove a bit of that excess material personally I like to do it all with the flat chisel because it gets a very nice finish I find that you can get a much nicer even sort of taper to it and I can just sort of push in slightly with that corner there to cut right up close to that that bead without damaging it so we'll go in there in a minute clean up those few fibers and then we'll work right off that end again so you can see the beauty of these short handles I can turn the chisels very quickly they don't get caught on my body it just works really nicely and like I say if they do dig in you just naturally stop shredding so there's no fear of needing that extra control or leverage so those few little fibers will go in there with the tip of the skew chisel again and just clean those up just like so and that is looking pretty much like a chair leg now this is very green at the moment so we would have left that that 10 and oversize so that when it's fully dry we'll put it back on the lathe and we'll turn a very accurate round joint but for the time being that's ready to take off the lathe and dry just before we take it off to get an even nicer finish on the wet wood the green wood we can actually use some of the shavings that have come off the wood and landed on the floor make sure you haven't got any grass in there and you can just hold that onto the wood and and the friction is gonna build up and it's gonna bring all the natural oils out of the wood and put a really nice finish on there to try and compensate my legs one getting bigger than the other I actually use my right leg now and I hold that onto the wood if you're working out in the woods in the winter this is quite a nice job to do because it warms your hands up but a few passes like that and it puts a really nice glossy finish on there just like so now you don't have to do it at this stage but if you wanted to you could get a little bit of cloth and you could use that oil that we've got in our oil well and you could actually hold that onto the wood and while it's spinning you can put a nice finish on there just like so move that string along a little bit and that's it really that is a chair leg so you can see with very simple tools for chisels will actually only use 3 chisels to actually create this shape and a little bit of muscle power and you can create something it from from effectively firewood into something that's a perfectly functional chair like so there you go a typical three three beat pattern wins a chair leg I have a bit of sweet chestnut so hopefully that will give you a lot of help and how to get the lathe up and running and how to get the best from those fortunes or so so we will show you how to do some more projects with the pole eight soon thanks a lot you

Channel: Ben & Lois Orford

Views: 129,706

Rating: 4.9489245 out of 5

Keywords: ben orford, lois orford, greenwood, nature, craft, knives, bushcraft, woodwork, pole lathe, shave horse, axe, tools

Id: i4roT7ohT7I

Length: 28min 30sec (1710 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 04 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Steveio1687]

What a excellent teacher. Clearly explaining the purpose, technique, and reasoning behind every facet of the lathe and chisels without getting into the weeds of minutiae that experts often get mired in. Excellent video on something I'll never have personal experience with and I envy any of his students in this ancient craft. I feel like I could give it a go just from watching this chap. Well done!

[u/WizardofEarl]

You should see his spoon carving videos.