Woodturning a Crazy Rolling Pin

in today's video we're going to turn a french tapered rolling pin with a crazy pattern welcome back all you wonderful people now i'm so glad to have you back in the shop in this video i wanted to do a project that showcases just how much preparation goes into a project before you actually put it on the lathe and turn it and then how that goes once you do put it on the lathe so i wanted to do a french tapered rolling pin because that's something that i do a lot of and we're just going to play around and have fun with it and make it crazy i'm jason geyser this is geyser wood turner let's make a crazy french tapered rolling pin so i thought for this project i will use some good domestic hardwoods so i'm going to use cherry maple and walnut and this is the walnut right here it's eight quarter material which is two inches thick and i'm just going to cut it to length i'm going to cut a knot off the end there set it aside to be used for something later and then i'm going to cut a piece that's about 19 inches i want this rolling pin to end up at about 18 inches so i'm going to give myself a little bit of room just in case now i'm going to joint the edge and make it nice and flat so that i have something to put up against my table saw fence and we're going to rip this into quarter inch strips and you can see where all the preparation comes in here so i'll go ahead and just rip down all of this piece of walnut here and we'll rip it down into about 12 strips okay and then we'll do some maple and again just repeating the process okay and then we'll go ahead and rip the cherry into about a dozen more quarter inch strips and you'll see i'll end up with a whole bunch of strips of different colored pieces of wood that i need to glue together so we're going to glue this together into one solid blank again but first we're going to sort it into different colors kind of make it interesting so i'm going to do the cherry maple walnut and then just repeat that pattern until we're ready for our glue up okay so here's the bad news most of this project is just sorting and gluing sorting and gluing sorting and gluing but it's all worth it in the end now you don't have to glue this all up in one block i chose to do that because i can do it relatively fast but you've only got so much work time on your glue so if you need to you can always glue it up in several blocks and then glue those together that's fine too so we'll go ahead and just lay down all these strips and then we're gonna put some wood glue on them and i prefer to use a water resistant wood glue on a rolling pin we'll go ahead and just squirt it out like you're putting mustard on a hot dog and then i like to spread it even further and i'll use a small zip roller something like that to spread it out don't spread it out too thin though you want the glue to actually be able to sit in that joint and be able to squeeze out a little bit if you can there we go we're getting to the end here we can put everything together now and line it all up and then go ahead and clamp and then you're going to want to let that sit for at least an hour or two before you scrape the glue and then longer than that if you want it to come to a feel full cure but you should be able to use it in the table saw before it comes to a full cure so i think i waited something like four hours before i took it out of the clamps and i just use a paint scraper to scrape the glue off if you let the glue dry all the way it can kind of rip the wood out as you're scraping the glue off as well so it's good to do it a little bit early then i take a tapering jig for the table saw we're going to set it about seven degrees and we're going to make this one important cut here and it'll make a seven degree cut across the grain of this wood and what that's going to do is it's going to make this piece interesting so now we're going to cut it into more quarter inch strips so like i said cutting and gluing cutting and gluing so we'll cut as many strips as we can get out of this one block of wood and you just keep cutting until you have another dozen or so strips and these cut off pieces you can save them and probably glue them back together and make something interesting out of those now we've got these strips here that have this interesting angle on them that are cherry maple and walnut and i've got them all lined up the way they came out of the table saw but i'm going to make it a little more interesting we're going to flip every other one i've got a line here that's kind of cut out and so i'm going to make a little line on the end that goes across all of them that way i know which ones are flipped up and which ones are flipped down and we'll go ahead and do some more sorting and gluing as things move along with our blank here you'll see this kind of cool zigzag pattern starting to develop and i think that's fun i was hoping it would be a little bit more random but i really like the look of this okay we're ready for some more gluing so we'll go ahead and do just like we did before and we'll lay out our strips in order we'll squeeze some glue onto them and then we'll spread that glue out with a roller now you want to be really careful here and not to spread it too thin because you do want some glue in those joints the glue is what's going to hold these joints together and one more time this goes a little bit faster we've actually used up a lot of material and so our blank is getting thinner as we go but it looks pretty cool so we'll go ahead and clamp that up now in hindsight i would have used a couple of rigid boards on the side or even something like angle iron to like spread the pressure across the blank evenly and after i let this sit overnight and i come take a look at it i notice that there's some gaps in it and it's something that i'm concerned about um but i'm going to go ahead and turn this i know there's glue down in those joints just between the clamps these strips flex just a little bit so like i said in hindsight i would probably glue it up a different way just to keep more even pressure on it but i think this will work out so now we're going to make this even crazier and do one more angle cut on it while we cut out our rolling pin blank so i'll find which side is the flattest we'll put in our angled jig at the same seven degrees that we did before we'll go ahead and run that through the table saw and get us a flat side that we can cut our rolling pin blank out of okay now once that's done we can finally go to our two inch thickness and set it up to cut one blank out of it there we go we almost have something that we can put on the wood lathe and turn now save these pieces you'll probably be able to glue those back together if you clean up those joints and you'll have one more rolling pin blank out of the whole thing which would be nice that's looking pretty cool i'm a little concerned about those cracks in it but we'll see how they do so we'll go ahead and just trim the ends and make them square and it kind of cuts off that jagged little edge that's on there so that you can mark it and put it between centers on the wood lathe a little bit easier so we did all that prep work and that's the real magic and now we get to mount it on the lathe and actually bring out that magic that we just did and so i'm going to just mark center here on both sides and then we'll mount it in the lathe between centers and we'll be ready to turn it the problem that we have with this piece though is there is grain directions running everywhere um and so i'm not going to do this with a spindle roughing gouge because it's going to have too much surface area it's going to want to grab too big of pieces of wood as they're coming against the grain and i don't want that so i'm going to use my bowl gouge and i'm just going to take little bits at a time and plunge straight in to rough this piece out and i'll go down about a quarter inch and then smooth that off and then we'll start again and keep going and we'll go across the piece and do that over and over again until we get it down to a cylinder so that being said this piece does take a little bit longer to rough it out but that's okay take your time because if you have little pieces of wood or chunks rip out of there it's going to disappoint you because you've already put so much work into this you don't want to destroy this on the lathe so now that we have it down to a cylinder on one side we just have to move the tool rest down and do it on the other now when you get down to where you're close to round just take a look with your eyes and try and make sure that you're roughly the same diameter all the way across and then later on we'll go ahead and set the diameter so that we know that it's true at least across the center so with my calipers i'm i'm going to find about the thinnest spot here the spot with the least diameter and i'll set my calipers to that now i want it to be across the center part at least the same diameter because we're going to taper down the sides anyways so i'll set my calipers and it doesn't fit there it doesn't fit there so we want to bring it down to where it all fits under the calipers and then i'll know i'll at least be exact across the center and i'll have the same diameter in a barrel and then i can taper down the sides from there this is the point at which you have to use a little bit of finesse so take off a little bit on one side take a little bit off on the other side of that point and just stop and check it every once in a while and make sure that you're doing okay so i'm still good there got a little bit more to remove and you do this really slowly because you can't really put wood back on at this point you can only take it off and make it thinner and we want to try and maximize the most thickness that we can out of our blank so that we have have the biggest diameter we can for our rolling pin all right so that looks pretty good we'll go ahead and taper down the ends now now we need to set the depth for our taper on the end of our rolling pin so i'm going to get out the calipers and i found their experience at about an inch and three sixteenths to an inch and a quarter looks really good and so we'll go ahead and set that and then you can use a parting tool a carbide tool i prefer to use my skew chisel and do a peeling cut where i just rest the bevel on the wood and raise the handle and it peels away the wood and then you're just going to want to check and check and check again until you get down to where you've got a good fit and those calipers slip over the wood now if you go too far and those calipers are a little bit loose you can always fix it on the other side by just matching the side that you did first so that's pretty good we'll move on to the other side and go ahead and set that one now i want to mark out how far the taper is going to go and you can do that with just a ruler and put a mark or a lot of times i like to use a storyboard or a template and it's pre-marked i'm going about six inches in if it's a little bit shorter you can make a shorter taper that's fine and i just go ahead and put a line on there and then again with the bowl gouge i'm going to come back and we're going to start making our taper and i want to start on the end where i want to remove the most material and we'll just start nibbling away little bits of wood as we go i'm using the bowl gouge again to cut so i don't have any issues with the end grain of the wood because this rolling pin is all jumbled up i don't want it to tear out and i don't want to have to do a whole lot of sanding i want a nice smooth cut when i'm done so i'll go ahead and work this down and you can leave it straight or you can kind of slightly curve it it's really up to you i like to kind of slightly curve this taper down to the end and make it nice and smooth and flowing okay one other thing i like to do is i don't like a sharp point right here that can make lines in your dough so i'll come up beyond the line and then i will kind of blend everything in so that i get this nice even flow all the way down to the end and this is the point is where you really want to take your time and just look at the shape a lot of times you want your eyes up on top of the piece of wood or you have some sort of contrast not where you're cutting but somewhere where you can see the shape easily then you can take your time and take away all those high spots that are making it so it doesn't look smooth and flowing but just take your time and make it look good because we're going to have to repeat this on the other side and so we don't really want to have to come back to this later all right that's looking pretty good so we'll go ahead and move to the other side and finish our taper on that side so it's really the same process you just have to put your body in a different position and go across working your way from the end to the middle until you get up to that line and then again blending everything in so that looks smooth and take your time and step back and take a look at it so you can see exactly what you're doing and how close you are to the other side another thing i like to do is i'll stop the lathe and i'll fill everything with my hands because my hands can tell me a whole lot more than what my eyes can they can find bumpy spots or spots where it's a little bit thicker that i missed with my eyes okay and then the last thing i like to do is i like to round the ends just a little bit so it doesn't look like it's just square and cut off and it gets rid of this little point that the center points go into as well so i'll take my 3 8 spindle gouge and we'll just kind of roll a bead on the end and then bring that in a little bit at a time until i have about an eighth to three sixteenths just enough to get rid of that center point when i saw off the ends at this point i'm going to do the first sanding on this and i'm going to leave it right on the lathe and i like to use a power sanding method where i use a die grinder it's a pneumatic die grinder and i can put a little velcro pad and i'm using 120 grit and i'll go across the whole rolling pin first and then i'm going to check it for imperfections and i'm really concerned about some of those micro cracks that were left in it before from my clamping method i'm noticing that there are some little micro cracks in this piece that i don't want to get flour and food down into so i'm going to use a ca glue or super glue filling method and what i do first is i'm going to use some wax and this is some of my paste wax that i use as a finish it has some walnut oil and some beeswax on carnauba but you can use any wax or any paste wax to do this you just want to lightly go over the surface and you don't want to get it down into your crack and then you're going to come back with your ca glue and it helps to have one of these piping tips on the end and then you can just lay that glue right down into the crack and what the wax does is it's going to help the glue not to stick and soak in around it and make it look horrible because super glue tends to do that it'll soak into all the wood and then you can't really change the finish after that so this will help it stick in the crack and then not on the surface and we can sand or cut away the bumps of super glue that are left on the surface so i'll go over it one time and hit it with activator and then a lot of times it sinks in a little bit and still leaves a crack there so i'll go over it one more time and just fill in anything with superglue and this is a medium ca glue that i'm using and then we'll hit it with the activator one more time and then we can do that with all of our rolling pin and once any of those cracks are are filled we can either sand it off or a lot of times what i like to do is just come along with my bowl gouge and just skim that surface and cut off any of the bumps that were left there and every once in a while when you cut these off they will pull out of the crack and so you have to check for that i didn't have a problem with that on this rolling pin though so just make sure it's all smooth and then we can go ahead and sand through the grits one more time and i'll start with 120 again smooth everything out and check it and then i'll go through all the grits i'll go from 180 to 40 320 and 400. i want to just get this as smooth as i can and then a lot of times i'll grab some shavings off the lathe and just kind of burnish the end now it's time for the really fun part the part that brings out all the color and beauty in this piece of wood we get to oil it and put a finish on so i like to use walnut oil and the one i have is walnut oil and it has some natural waxes like beeswax and carnauba wax but you can use walnut oil or you can use any butcher block oil or mineral oil any food safe oil will work great for this we'll just spread it on and then we've got to cut off the ends and then one thing i like to do is i'll put one of those sanding pads in the lathe like an 80 grit and i can sand up the end and smooth it all up and then i can put my finishing touches on the rolling pin one of the things i like to do is i like to burn my signature in the end so i have this little brand that i made and i'll heat it up with a propane torch it's a little piece of brass that i carved out with my initials on it and i've learned you have to put the rolling pin up against your leg or it'll slip through and you don't want to burn yourself because your hand will close around that piece of brass don't ask me how i know that and there we go then we just have to sand it up just a little bit more and then we can go through the grits and sand up the ends and then oil them i hope you've enjoyed this video and we'll see you soon you

Channel: Geiserwoodturner

Views: 21,709

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Id: YXW5QjM95CY

Length: 23min 50sec (1430 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 22 2022