How To Turn A Wooden Easter Bunny!!!

happy easter everyone today we're going to learn how to make one of my easter bunnies here we go all right so first thing you're going to want to do is take a piece of wood cut it in half glue it back together so that when it's glued back together it ends up being a square blank before you actually put the pieces back together you want to glue a piece of butcher paper in between now you can go with a another type of paper but it has to be thick enough that it won't end up saturating the paper completely with the glue because we want this to be able to split apart on the paper seam later on and if the paper is too thin that won't work so like a card stock might work but i like butcher paper because it tends to be pretty good clamp that up let it set start turning i'm going to start with the larger blank that's going to be for the body and for this bunny i'm using cherry and i just happen to have some three by three blanks so i'm gonna true that up um i have one of my shorter tool rests on right now and didn't feel like changing it so there's a lot of moving back and forth but not for very long i turned a tenon on the end so that i could hold it in the jaws of my nova chuck and get that tightened down and finish roughing the blank i'm going to start shaping the blank using my spindle gouge and this is going to end up being the front of the bunny at the tail stock end and the butt of the bunny at the headstock end and you're basically making a large egg shape now this can be whatever shape you want but for my bunnies to look the way that they do you're basically going to want a large fat egg and at a certain point you can take the tail stock away and try to refine the front of the bunny you don't want it to be too pointy because this is going to be the chest of the bunny essentially but i like to sand a little bit first before i move on to trying to refine the back then i'll put on some soft jaws and this is one of the whatever chuckies from don doyle's rubber chucky set and after i have that i can start turning the other end of the body egg to try to just get it to its final shape or at least close to its final shape before parting it off and once i have a little bit more of the backside revealed i guess and i like the shape of it hopefully i like the shape of it then i can take that back end and sand it a little bit more and part it off and try not to drop it oops this happens um more often than i'd care to admit and then once you're done with that um you're going to start turning the head and the head i'm going to kind of rush through this part because it is very similar to the body so i'm not going to do too much explaining but you're basically just turning a smaller version of the same egg shape and again i like to go with kind of a chunky egg not too thin because it'll make the body and the head look a little bit odd if they're too thin so sand that same process do a little bit of work around the back side sand that up and then after you've got it sanded as much as you need to then you're going to part it off but i like to get it as close as i can to its final shape before parting it off so that there's not too much to hand sand now this is where we are going to be taking our blank that we previously glued up and we're going to make the ears for this part i switched over to my axeminster jaws and i've got the pin or my axemen star check and i've got the pin jaws in place and i want to make sure that this is very well centered on that seam if it's not i'm going to have ears that are two different sizes so i'm going to start again roughing the blank with the tail stock in place take the tail stock away and try to finish up that shape for these it is essentially another egg shape although the top of the egg is pointed and the bottom of the egg i'm going to leave flat sand that up polish it and now i'm just going to get to a point where i can kind of part it off and i like to part the ears with a slight undercut and that way it sort of fits onto the head a little bit better although i'll do some shaping on this later on to really refine the fit to the head you can see how centered that line is so i think i did a pretty good job on that last but not least is the tail and the tail is not an egg shape this is the only thing that's not really an egg shape and it's just going to be a small sphere but you can make it kind of squat or like a button or you can make it an egg shape it might just look a little funny and again i'm using my spindle gouge this is a thompson spindle gouge i think it's a half inch i really love those tools and i'm gonna leave a little tenon on the end um just so that i have something that i'll be able to glue into the body and i like to put these little grooves onto the tenon just so that i have a better glue surface it doesn't need to have this you can just glue a dowel into the butt but i like for the glue to be able to grab onto something a little bit better so we've got our four pieces and we've got two areas of the body that might need to be sanded but honestly you can just leave them as is if you've parted them off really nicely either way we're gonna take the body and we're gonna sand a flat spot onto the body so that it can stand nicely and another one at the top where the head is going to attach you don't really need the flat spot for the head but i like where it comes to the body at a flat a little bit better than if it were kind of a round point connected to a round point and this is where we get to split the ears and see how well we've done with our turning and centering and you can just break it right at the paper joint it splits a half splits in half right at the paper and then you just sand any of that excess paper and glue away until you reveal that beautiful wood underneath all right this is where it comes to a little bit more of a finesse with our sanding so we don't want it to be fit like that because it rocks around on there so i just roll up a piece of sandpaper and i hand shape sort of a round into the underside of the ear and hopefully it fits the head now if you've got an oscillating spindle sander with a really small spindle this works well for that too or just a spindle sander that you put in a drill press you could probably use that as well i don't have one that works so i sand by hand then you're gonna take a small drill bit i think that's about a sixteenth of an inch drill into the bottom of the ears find the spot where they match the head drill into the head i think i drilled a little bit crooked on this and in fact i know after making it that i did draw a drill a little crooked but it's okay every bunny is unique this one's got one crooked ear and because it's a really tight fit i'm just shaving down the uh toothpicks a bit so that they fit a little bit better with some space for glue so that it's not all squeezing out make sure that they're the right length and that they all fit and get ready to glue but i'm going to keep drilling the other pieces first for gluing the head onto the body i like to drill two holes so that the head doesn't shift around too much and i don't want it to spin and it just it's a larger glue surface so i want to make sure it's really secure and i really just eyeball it but sometimes i have to open up the hole a little bit more maybe with a larger drill bit and i almost always use a smaller dowel than i have the drill and that just gives me some room to work with make sure everything fits make sure it's not too long and just double check everything this is exciting it's when everything starts to come together yay now i didn't worry too much about sanding the back of the bunny because that's where i'm going to drill the hole for the tail and again i like to drill a little oversized because it'll still fit in and it'll kind of hide that oversized hole with the shape of the tail so i'm going to use wood glue sometimes i just use a medium ca glue but in this case i'm going to use wood glue because i'm not in a hurry pressing in the toothpicks letting them kind of sit for a second and i'm trying to squeeze as much of the glue into the hole as i can and then any of the squeeze out i'll try to wipe off just so that it doesn't get all over the head i know this is so exciting watching glue literally dry glue some more into the head and insert and i think i put the wrong ear into the wrong hole so i had to adjust by trimming the little toothpick that was in the one and now there is some excess glue and you can do one of two ways to wipe this off you can use as a straw and the crease of the straw if you kind of fold it right into that corner will sort of scoop up any of the excess glue or you could just switch over and use a paper towel either way works if you do have too much excess you might want to sand it a little bit first before finishing but not totally necessary depending on what finish you use i am gluing the dowels into the body now wiping off any of the really excessive excess now i don't want it to squeeze all all over the neck area so any of the excess i'm hoping that i can get rid of most of it glue into the holes in the head and it's pretty good now i'm going to glue into the tail hole i don't know what else to call that hole without making it sound really weird and so that the tail doesn't fall off because that is the one that i kind of risk it falling off i'm going to tape it into place while it at least sets up now this is something that i would recommend doing for the bunnies because they're a little bit wobbly um so i like to take a piece of double stick tape and tape it to a board so that i can finish it properly and so that i can get around all of the different angles and everything so i'm just trimming the tape so that none of it is exposed because i don't want any of the edges of the tape to ruin my finish surface so this actually works really well for me because i probably eight times out of ten drop whatever i'm finishing so this helps me not drop it i can take it outside into the fresh air make the air not so fresh by spraying it with um i believe this is a deft satin spray lacquer i really like the satin finish it's not too shiny although it does give a little bit of a shiny finish and then there you have it bunny bunny yay bunnies yay more bunnies yay now this is just the one that i did for the video but i also have other examples of other bunnies that i did a couple weeks ago i hope you enjoyed thank you for watching i hope if you have any questions you'll reach out and ask them let me know what you think and yeah happy easter guys bye

Channel: Rebecca DeGroot

Views: 1,661

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Easter, wood, woodturning, cherry, turning, egg, eggs, wooden, woodworking, woodworker, woodturner, lathe, bunny, rabbit, hop

Id: E5mZ9iq3quc

Length: 12min 20sec (740 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 04 2021