http://www.getwoodworking.com September 2019 The Woodworker & Good Woodworking 83
27 An often overlooked function of a lathe is the fact
it can be set up as a disc sander with the addition of
an MDF disc, some double-sided tape and abrasive24 I hadn’t thought about how to sand the item
when I first started this project. My first line of attack
was to use a firm foam block and hold it against
the spinning wood; this seemed to work quite well
but did sand one side slightly more than the other21 This was a bit of a learning curve for me and
the best tool I found to clean up the ends was a
25mm rolled edge skew used with the long point
doing the cutting. You can see I’m using a ring centre
rather than a point, as this could act like a wedge
on the thin section timber25 To overcome this you can put the lathe in reverse;
this is a function that I don’t use very often but does
come in handy at times like this. If you don’t have
this available on your lathe, you’ll need to do more
by hand
22 The project should start to be taking shape by
now. Once again, allow 10mm waste at each end.
Keep the toolrest as close to the wood as possible;
this will act as a guide to where the wood starts,
and means that when the tool is over the rest,
it will start cutting19 Now comes the interesting bit. Draw a rough
idea of the shape you want for the cross piece,
which needs to be 180 × 70 × 15mm thick. You
could quite easily cut this out by hand, or use
a bandsaw or fretsaw, but where is the sense
of adventure in that!26 When I tried a dry fit of the base, I realised that the
cross member was too thick and therefore made the
piece look cumbersome, so after drilling some 38mm
holes to accept the salt/pepper pots, I decided to cut
the timber to about 10mm thick on the bandsaw23 The importance of keeping the bevel in contact is
no more important than it is when cutting something
like this. If you approached this with a scraper-type
tool, then you’d find that the edges of the flat section
would splinter very easily20 When the lathe is spinning, you can see the outline
of the drawing quite clearly. Set the speed of the lathe
quite high at around 2,000rpm; this will allow the
tool to cut more cleanly