Learning the Lathe

When my brother, Brek, gave me the Shopsmith last year, he also gave me all the lathe accesories it came with. I'm not sure what got me going but sometime recently, I realized it may be practical to make gifts for people with the lathe.

My friend, Aaron, recently invited Melissa and I to his wedding and I thought...this would be the perfect time to figure out how to use the lathe. I decided every newly married couple could use a pepper grinder. After some research, I ordered a crush/grinder mechanism and some forestner drill bits and signed up for the begining turning class at Highland Hardware. My instructor informed us that woodturing tools can lose their edge after about 3 seconds and stressed the importantance of sharpening. Shortly thereafter, I bought a grinder and built a woodturning tool sharpening jig.

The first attempt did not work. I ended up burning the wood because I pushed the drive center and cup center together too tightly. The challenge on these pepper mill projects is that you have to hold the center of both ends of the grinder body, and the grinder body has holes dilled out of the center of each side. So I tried turning little stopper-like pieces to shove into the drilled grinder body holes. Since my stopper pieces, alone, did not provide enough friction to spin the grinder body, I compensated by smashing the two centers together. It worked great until my soap on my cup center wore away and the wood started burning. And then the stopper started rotating inside the grinder body. Soon after I saw smoke and smelled the terrible burning that would later kick of a chain of other events making it worse.

Later I went online and ordered something called a "live center", which replaces the fixed cup center with one that spins on ball bearings. Problem solved! I don't understand why live centers are not standard on these Shopsmiths.