Australian Wood Review – June 2019

68 Australian Wood Review

WOODTURNING

Made by

Hand...and Leg

Jeff Donne shows how the power of the ancient pole lathe lives on.

T

his guy at a village fair eyed me

up and down. With a befuddled

look on his face, his gaze moved to

the contraption I was leaning on like

a straw-chewing farmer on a lunch-

time break.

‘Is that a guillotine?’ he said,

scratching his chin. And so begins

our beguiling journey into antiquity

and kookiness that is a pole lathe.

These ancient contraptions with

roots lost in the sawdust of time were

the tools of bodgers, the itinerant

woodworkers from 17th century

Buckinghamshire who made chair

parts from trees in the woods,

emerging only after the sun had set

on a day of hard graft.

Some say this is where the bodgers

got their name, their profession being

a corruption of ‘badger’, that stripy-

headed, ill-tempered combination of

wombat and Tasmanian devil that

snuffles around English woodlands

and gardens at night.

Others say the bodgers are

responsible for the badge of dishonour

bestowed upon fly-by-night tradies

who build houses without roofs and

other ‘bodgie jobs’, because bodgers,

who made parts for chair builders,

were masters of doing half the job.

What we do know, however, is that

pole lathes are surprisingly efficient

machines that are easy to use

given time, and they offer a deeply

satisfying way of working with wood.

How it works

A pole lathe is a reciprocating lathe,

which means the blank being turned

spins in alternate directions. The blank

is driven with a strip of cord that’s

wrapped twice around and attached to

something springy at one end, and a

foot operated treadle at the other.

When your foot pushes the treadle the

blank is turned towards a sharp tool

waiting to craft anything from chair

legs to baby rattles, and when you lift

your foot back up, the blank turns in

the opposite direction.

That’s right, a pole lathe only cuts

wood for half the time you are

actually at the machine. So if you

are spending a couple of hours

turning some Windsor chair legs,

about an hour of that is down time,

albeit spread over about a thousand

individual rest periods; it’s like work

and smoko rolled into one.

The rhythm you achieve with a

reciprocating lathe is actually a

beautiful thing. With some practice

you develop a gentle rocking motion