The_Woodworker_and_Woodturner_-_October_2019

TURNING

64 The Woodworker & Good Woodworking October 2019 http://www.getwoodworking.com

The Engineer’s Workshop – coat rack

Dave Roberts’ coat rack is made from ebony

and... well, you can probably guess the rest

I

haven’t turned yew wood for quite a
while, partly because I’ve been so busy
with commercial turning, and also because
it’s not very often that my customers ask
for anything turned in yew; generally they want
oak, mahogany, pine, etc. While these timbers
are fine, of course, they’re not as exciting as yew.
With yew, you never know quite how it’s going
to look until you start turning it, and fairly often
it’s full of surprises. I have in the past had yew
with barbed wire inside it! This happens when
fencing has been stapled to the tree, which has
then grown around it over many years. Though
rare, it has the benefit of adding even more
interest because the metal turns the timber
purple. As you may have gathered by now,
I’m quite passionate about this timber. Anyway,
I decided to turn something to show off the
beauty of this yew, but didn’t have a piece
big enough to turn a reasonable bowl. What
I did have, though, was a lot of branchwood

• ideal for making a coat rack, whose length
  would show the grain to good advantage.

YEW CAN LEAVE

YOUR HAT ON

TOOLS YOU’LL NEED

• Spindle roughing gouge


• Parting tool


• 6mm gouge


• 13mm Forstner bit


• 12mm skew chisel


• 6mm drill bit

Split turning for symmetry

With a job like this, it’s as easy to make two coat

racks by preparing a blank that can be split into

two to give symmetrical pieces. Simply turning

a branch then sawing it down the middle and

planing the two pieces flat won’t produce two

perfect halves. Also, the job of planing the pieces

on a surface planer is quite dangerous as there

isn’t much to hold on to. The best approach, then,

is split turning – gluing together two pieces that

are turned and then separated along the glue line.

I chose two branches with some small

branches on them, which I knew would alter the

grain pattern, and lend it some extra character,

and ran them through the bandsaw to roughly

square them up. The two surfaces to be glued

together have to be flat, of course, and while a

surface planer will do this in no time, a hand plane

or a hand-held electric planer will do the job just

as well. It’s worth putting a steel rule across each

surface to check they’re truly flat before you glue

them together by putting a thin layer of PVA on

both surfaces and clamping them together with

1 Cut the yew wood roughly on the bandsaw before
planing it up

4 Turn a 32 × 6mm spigot on both ends. Check them

with Vernier callipers

2 Put glue on each face and clamp them together

with paper in between and leave to dry

3 With the blank between centres, use the 5 Use a 6mm gouge to turn the concave in the centre
spindle roughing gouge to turn it to a cylinder