How to Make a Baguette, American, or Pasta Rolling Pin

hi I'm Ernie Conover I'd like to show you how to turn different styles of rolling pins either makes a great gift and is a good seller at a craft fair you want to start with very accurately sized wood because you need a perfect cylinder and you need a little more than two inches I like two and a quarter to two and a half these blanks are all two and three eighths which makes a very nice pin by far hard maple is the best material it's close grain it washes well it holds up for years soft maple is fine if you can't find hard the first style we're going to turn is what's called a baguette pin this will be turned to a cylinder and then tapered at each end for a distance of four inches to that end I have not only marked the Centers of these billets very carefully I've scribed a 1-inch circle on the end so that I can easily get to my final size for the traditional or American style rolling pin we are going to have a rotating handle on a trunnion on each end and the blanks are a bit shorter so they're easy to do in a mini lathe somewhere between 10 and 14 inches makes a very nice american-style pin let's start with a baguette pin the first task is to bring this to a perfect cylinder our finding perfect centers helped a lot with that we're going to use a roughing out gouge and our fingers to tell us when we just come around and we'll get a perfect cylinder I'll show you how the best tool for the job is a spindle roughing out gouge ground to a long angle I'm not running real fast here about 800 rpm and I always present that down a little high and then bring it down till it touch it helps greatly to take a piece of paraffin wax and wax your tool wrist because your gouge will now that I have this rolling pin nearly round for its entire length I will just take a very light cut until I get all of the flat spots removed and I can feel that if I use my thumb to hold the tool on the wrist and just lightly touch right here at the back and I can feel those flat spots yeah go away the idea here is to keep the to a movie you lighten up your touch and move on and then cut a little more aggressively as you come to a point where you can see feel a flat spot and there we have it perfectly round and a cylinder of constant diameter to get this perfectly smooth there's two things you can do one is use ask you and if you're handy with a skew it will plane this to a very nice finish but you can do this with a roughing out gouge by turning it to about a thirty degree angle bringing it down so it just cuts and it's sliding it along like this keeping this thirty degree angle very very constant just going like that very light cut but you'll be rewarded by a nice cylinder with a very good finish that will need minimal sanding a good way to smooth out your rolling pin is with a sanding mandrel than an electric drill our final task is to taper this area from four inches from each end down to one inch in diameter at the very end and this will make the handles for this French style pin again you're roughing out gouges the best way to do this very important is that you create a straight line taper down through here you should be able to set a ruler on this and it touches everywhere along here it doesn't want to be curved in or belied out and there we have it it's cop and called a baguette pin because it looks like a French baguette loaf of bread a great finish for our rolling pin is either olive or walnut oil I'm using olive oil here and as you can see that's bringing the curls of that maple right out and give that a couple of weeks to age with some oil and it'll just look stunning I turned the cylinder for the main part of the Americans now pin in the same way that I turned the baguette pin I brought it to a perfect cylinder and then I put a good chamfer on each end and faced each end so that would be smooth and it removed all sinner II marks I now have to drill these with a half-inch hole at each end and that hole has to be in the axis of this rolling pin or it'll be goofy when you use it so what I've done now is I put a drill in the headstock and I simply caught it on the other end with my Center and I'm watching my ram graduations very carefully here and when I get to exactly the depth of one inch I stop turn it around and I'll do the same thing this is the four and a half inch long by one inch square blank that I'm going to make the handles for our american-style rolling pin and that needs to have a half-inch hole drilled all the way through it and our lathe is again a great way really I go half way and I simply turn this around catch it with live Center again and drill the other way until the two holes meet perfect this is the 5 and 7/8 inch along by 3/4 inch square blank that I'm making the trunnion out of I've turned it all the way down the length to this button head with a half inch wrench and that has given me a nice slide fit with my handle I'm now going to use a skew to bring this whole area slightly under half inch so that the handle turns quite freely in fact I want it to be a pretty sloppy fit so that the handle can even get wet and still turn freely there the handle is free to turn but the trend is going to glue nicely in the end of the rolling pin itself now it's time to turn the outside of our handle and to turn it I've put a square of wood in a four jaw Chuck and turned a tapered half-inch tenon on there so this gets tighter the further I push it up onto that and that brings the whole more in line with the axis of the lathe so this handle I'm very there's our finished handle now put this through yeah turns freely and there is our finished rolling pin a variation on the rolling pin that you can easily make is to grind a little scraper right use an old screwdriver and I've ground it into a kind of a small round nosed scraper and by scraping grooves in here I can make this rolling pin into a pasta maker or pasta cutter so you want to space these three evenly you always point to scraper downhill light touch and you're not going to go real deep either and from the center of the groove I'm marking the next one almost done here I've sharpened this scraper twice as I've gone across here and I'm using it with a light touch shoot a wiggling it side to side that keeps up opening a little bit bigger than the scraper and I work the two sides and an angle till I get a pretty good flat there a narrow flat one more and there we are this will allow us to roll this across dough and make spaghetti noodles and there is our finished pasta cutter our efforts to maintain concentricity between our drilled holes and our trunnions has paid off or we have a rolling pin and a pasta cutter in which the handles turn perfectly with no wonkiness just go to any kitchen store and you'll be appalled at the lack of contra city in the average rolling pin

Channel: WoodworkersJournal

Views: 25,904

Keywords: how to make a rolling pin, make a baguette rolling pin, make a french rolling pin, make an american rolling pin, traditional rolling pin, woodturning, turning, how to turn a rolling pin, turning a rolling pin, kitchen tools, making a rolling pin, on a lathe, woodworking, woodworker

Id: HNNxr6LPUbs

Length: 10min 54sec (654 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 04 2016