Making a Gnomes on the Lathe

so it's kind of nasty outside and so i thought what i would do instead of working on cutting boards is work on some gnomes so i thought gnomes the little wooden ones that i turned were going to be kind of seasonal but it turns out that folks actually buy them year round and so i could never make enough of them which is a good thing it's a good problem to have but yeah today i'm going to work on making a batch of gnomes this will be the first batch of gnomes that will have brown beards which would be new for me i know that sounds like something small but a lot of folks that collect them from me are always looking for different ones so i've done gray beards different types of gray beards different types of white beards never done a brown beard so i'm going to do some brown beard ones today that's we're going to work on today i don't know how much of it i'll get filmed today but you'll get to see this video in its entirety over the next couple days as i complete the process because today i'll turn them get the shapes roughed out maybe get some noses made and then i'll need to glue beards on so that'll take a little bit of time but over the next few days i'll put that video together and when you see it it'll be like it was all in one day so just like most of my videos i'm going to do voice over so you don't have to listen to the whir of the vacuum cleaner and the lathe it's just not a good sound and then i'll speed up some of the process so that it doesn't take quite so long to show you what i'm doing so here we're just roughing the piece out so this just a piece of pine on the lathe using a roughing gouge getting the rough shape using a parting tool to create the base of the dome a bowl gouge to do some more shaping at this point you're just trying to rough out the shape of the gnome get the dimensions right so here i'm just peeling away the wood it's a really nice cut there you have parting tool just cleaning up the hat a little bit a smaller bowl gouge for the tighter spaces but yeah you can already see the gnome taking shape there it's hat and it's body here we're going to pull the tail stock away and clean up the top of the hat taking lighter and lighter cuts for a smoother finish here and here you have it roughed out this so the basic shape is down here we're going to take those light cuts i was telling you about that are going to give it a much smoother finish before we start with sanding and now we've moved into sanding we're going to start out with a lower grit i believe 100 grit here and we'll work our way up to 320 grit we're not looking for a mirror finish on these gnomes some things i sand to a much higher grit but with these gnomes 320 does the trick and once it's finished we'll just cut it off the lathe here and then here's some of the ones that i've completed up to this point different shapes and sizes the hats have been torched to give them that darker look and now we'll move on to making noses for them so we're going to chuck up a piece of cherry in the lathe and from here we're going to turn noses for each of those gnomes using a bowl gouge one of my most used tools making quick work this piece of cherry and we gotta shape up the tenon portion that's gonna actually go into the gnome so we'll drill a hole where the nose goes and that little tenon there will slide into that and mount the nose onto the gnome just sanding this piece up and then applying some wax before we part it off the lathe there you have it one nose i think there's about 14 more to go and then we'll have all of them done and this step is probably my least favorite and it's usually when my wife steps in to help out so this is where we take the fake fur and we actually glue it to each of the gnomes you have to cut it all make a little slit for the nose and then hot glue onto the gnomes but as you can see at this point they're done once you have the beards on they're ready to go to their new homes i really like the way the brown turned out glad i picked some of that up and so thankful my wife helps me out with this step because i'm not a huge fan of it and there you go these are just a few of the ones that we finished and they turned out great thanks so much for watching take care

Channel: Chris Poplin

Views: 1,503

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Wood turning, Making a gnome on the lathe, Turning a gnome, Making a gonk, Making an elf on the lathe, Wood gnome, Making a wood gnome, Busy Wren Creations, Chris Poplin, Easy wood turning project, Simple wood turning project, How to turn a gnome, How to make a gnome

Id: CbGzNRwUaYg

Length: 4min 53sec (293 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 19 2021