TURNING
66 The Woodworker & Good Woodworking October 2019 http://www.getwoodworking.com
The Engineer’s Workshop – coat rack
The spindle roughing gouge will make short
work of this, but remember to take your time
over the final passes and take light cuts. By doing
this you’ll get a better finish, which means less
work with abrasives. Place a steel rule on each
taper to check it is flat, and also check both ends
with Vernier callipers.... & sanding up
Start sanding with 120 grit, which should be
used lightly; if you press too hard it will leave
deep scratch marks. Then move on to 180 and
work up to 600 grit. Yew is one of those timbers
that deserves a good finish, so the final sanding
should be done with the lathe stopped. Keep
rubbing the abrasive up and down the grain and
in no time it will eliminate any sanding marks.
After wiping away loose dust, you can apply the
sanding sealer; one good coat will do. When dry,
rub it back with ‘0000’ grade wire wool, initially
with the lathe rotating, and then with the lathe
stopped so you can work the wire wool up and
down the grain. Finally, apply a light coat of polish.
To separate the halves, all you have to do is to
tap a chisel into the glue line at one end. Remove
the newspaper using coarse abrasive wrappedaround a cork block, then finish off with a coat
of sanding sealer.Drilling the peg holes
There are holes for eight pegs in all, four on
either side, and all drilled at a slight angle, so
you’ll have to make yourself a jig to hold the
coat rack. I managed by taping the rack around
a long square piece of timber with a long thin
piece attached to its front edge. This set-up tilted
the rack enough to get the right angle. Mark out
eight positions evenly spaced then you can drill
the holes. I used a 13mm Forstner bit, and drilled
to a depth of 20mm; just be careful you don’t
drill all the way through.Making the pegs
The eight pegs were also turned in yew, and
their caps from ebony. The pegs themselves can
be made straight from branchwood and I turned
them in four different sizes, the largest being
80mm and the smallest 56mm, with a difference
of 8mm between each peg. When you cut the
blanks to size, don’t forget to add enough for
the spigot and a bit to hold it in a chuck.
Mount the blanks between centres and withYEW: TALISMAN, WEAPON & MEDICINE
The yew tree (Taxus baccata) is one of three
British native conifers. Unlike Juniper and
Scots pine, however, the leaves, bark, and
seeds of yew are all poisonous; only the
seed’s red covering, which attracts the birds
that help to distribute the seeds, is innocuous.
The wood of the yew is close-grained; the
heartwood ranging in colour from deep gold
to a red brown, while the sapwood is white –
a contrast exploited in the lute, whose curved
back is traditionally made using alternative
strips of dark heartwood and pale sapwood.
As a native of these islands, the yew has
inevitably been involved in our history – as far
back, perhaps, as the second ice age 400,000
years ago, if the tip of a yew spear found in
Clacton, Essex is any indication. Most of
us expect to see yew trees growing in
churchyards, of course, but it’s likely that
the yews themselves predate the church
buildings, and mark the sites of earlier
religious practises. The yew was a sacred
tree to the tribes of Britain, who held it to
be a potent tree for the protection against
evil. The Celtic iw, in fact, is one of the oldest
tree names, and – transmuted into ew or ewe- is ingrained in ancient place names such
as Ewhurst or Ewshot, meaning yew-tree
wooded hill.
The sense of antiquity surrounding the
yew is further enhanced by the difficulty in
aging them accurately: older yews as they
tend to go hollow in the centre, which has led
to the tree entering popular legend for other
reasons. In 1769 in Fortingall, Perthshire, for
example, a funeral procession passed through
the trunk of a yew that was 52ft in girth.
At Shining Cliff wood near Ambergate,
Derbyshire, meanwhile, a family lived within
a yew tree known as the Betty Kenny tree,
and had even hewn out a cradle in one of
the boughs.
Another famous association is the defeat
of the French at Agincourt (hurrah!) thanks to
the English archers and their longbows made
of yew. The French, who were odds-on to win,
threatened to cut off the middle fingers of the
archers, which would’ve made it impossible
to ‘pluck the yew’, as drawing the bow was
known. After the battle, however, the
victorious archers waved their fingers at the
French saying, “See, we can still pluck yew!”
It is in the use of plants and trees for
medicinal purposes, however, that the old
magic thought to surround the yew enters
our modern world, for the yew has been found
to produce an alkaloid called taxol, that can
be extracted from yew clippings and the bark,
and which has benefits for people with certain
types of cancer. So from a poisonous tree,
we may be able to derive life-saving medicine^13 Turn one end of the ebony flat before securing it...
11 Put a little PVA glue on each cap, clamp them
in place and leave to dry12 Mount the pegs between centres and turn
them with a 6mm gouge10 Turn one end of the ebony flat and form a
6mm spigot9 Hold the blank between centres while you drill
a 6mm hole