Woodworking Tips: Working With Antler

one of the things that I've really come to enjoy doing in my shop is working with antler and I'm just I don't know what it is about antler maybe because I'm a deer hunter but I really enjoy using this as a medium with which to work I've made knife handles out of antler I've made little finials for the top boxes on an antler so what I want to do is talk about antler and see if I can get you as excited about antlers I am so we're going to talk about getting antler set up here on the lathe so one of the things I've done with the antler so far is I cut a chunk off the end of a piece of antler then you'll find you can cut antler on the bandsaw so I clip this off to length and because I was going to turn it I was looking for a piece that was fairly straight so this is a piece of antler that's got a pretty good straight access to it now if we look at the inside of the antler you can see that it's a little bit soft inside there so what we'll do is kind of stay away from that we're primarily going to work on turn on the outside stay away from the spongy antler inside as it goes on the lathe what I'll do is get the antler inside this four jaw Chuck and what we need to do is mess with it just a little bit to try to get the antler as centered as possible here on the lathe so I'm going to tighten her down and then just kind of spin the antler by hand so what I'm doing is as I turn this by hand I'm looking through it at the floor to see if the antler is little rule you know if it's bouncing around if the antler looks like it's running pretty straight then I think I'm pretty straight on the lathe so let's go ahead and snug down that four jaw Chuck now antler is pretty hard stuff so if you're going to turn this you want to use high speed steel chisels not tool steel and they're going to hold their edge against that antler a whole lot longer than tool steel would now as you position the tool rest you want to be careful because of course the antler is just a little bit funky shaped so being clear on one side doesn't mean you're going to be clear of the work on all sides so be real careful about that now we got kind of a tenuous hold here with our four jaw Chuck so you want to take it nice and easy on your passes on the antler just real light cuts a little bit at a time as we work our way down I'm going to start on the antler with just a half-inch bowl gouge and we'll get that cleaned up just a little bit my least favorite part of antler is that it smells like your worst trip ever to the dentist all right let's stop and have a look and see what our antler looks like and I think we can do a good reposition on the tool rest here in that cool the antler is starting to get exposed inside there so what's neat is we can leave a little bit of the antler exterior where it's so knobby but then also expose some of that nice hard work inside there I'll do a little bit more cutting then we'll have a look at what it takes to sand antler and get it real pretty I'm not sure yet what I'm going to use this particular piece of antler for I just want to use it as an example to show you what working with antler is like so I'm going to leave it like that for right now but let's talk about sand and now this is already pretty smooth pretty good cut quality so I'm going to start my antler sanding at 150 grit and we'll work our way up from there getting shiny now right here I'm at 3:20 and I'm going to be done with conventional abrasive and I'm going to go to a little bit of a buffing compound this is what you'd normally use on a buffing wheel or a strop and with that applied I'll go to a shop towel just a few minutes of sanding look at how nice that looks really shiny really starts to show the color so like I said I hope that I can get you as excited about working with antler as I am you know honestly off the top of my head I just don't know what it is about antler that makes me enjoy it so much but given the opportunity try a piece of antler in your shop use it as a way to accent your woodworking projects and I think you're just going to love it as much as I do

Channel: WoodWorkers Guild Of America

Views: 76,218

Rating: 4.6872039 out of 5

Keywords: woodworking tips, woodworking projects, wood project, wood tips, woodworking lesson, woodworking how to, woodworking diy, wood working, wood work, woodworking tutorials, woodworking videos, woodworking class, Wood Carving (xyloglyphy) (Hobby)

Id: Q4q5mupB1c0

Length: 5min 35sec (335 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 08 2013