Even with continuous revolution, however, the turner controls the contact of tool and wood entirely by hand. The style of cutting does not have the pause required by the reciprocating lathe's rotation. Ĭontinuous revolution of the workpiece can be human-powered with a treadle wheel, or achieved with water, steam, or electric power.
WOODWORKERS GUILD OF AMERICA WINDOWS
For example, reciprocating bow lathes are still used to turn beads for the Arabian lattice windows called Meshrebeeyeh that so charmed Holtzapffel in the 1880s. The reciprocating lathe, while primitive technology requiring considerable dexterity to operate, is capable of excellent results in skilled hands.
The reciprocating lathe may be human-powered with a bow, as well as with spring mechanisms. The turner cuts on just one side of the rotation, as with the pole lathe. The reciprocating lathe is powered by a bow or a spring, rotating the wood first in one direction, and then in the other. Wood lathes work with either reciprocating or continuous revolution. Woodturning appeals to people who like to work with their hands, find pleasure in problem-solving, or enjoy the tactile and visual qualities of wood. 21st-century turners restore furniture, continue folk-art traditions, produce custom architectural work, and create fine crafts for galleries.
WOODWORKERS GUILD OF AMERICA PORTABLE
In many parts of the world, the lathe has been a portable tool that goes to the source of the wood or adapts to temporary workspaces. The tools can be reshaped easily for the task at hand. A skilled turner can produce a wide variety of objects with five or six simple tools. However, the wood lathe is still used for decentralized production of limited or custom turnings. Industrial production has replaced many of these products from the traditional turning shop. Items made on the lathe include tool handles, candlesticks, egg cups, knobs, lamps, rolling pins, cylindrical boxes, Christmas ornaments, bodkins, knitting needles, needle cases, thimbles, pens, chessmen, spinning tops legs, spindles, and pegs for furniture balusters and newel posts for architecture baseball bats, hollow forms such as woodwind musical instruments, urns, sculptures bowls, platters, and chair seats. The skills to use the tools by hand, without a fixed point of contact with the wood, distinguish woodturning and the wood lathe from the machinist's lathe, or metal-working lathe. In pre-industrial England, these skills were sufficiently difficult to be known as 'the misterie' of the turners guild. The operator is known as a turner, and the skills needed to use the tools were traditionally known as turnery. Like the potter's wheel, the wood lathe is a simple mechanism that can generate a variety of forms. Woodturning is the craft of using the wood lathe with hand-held tools to cut a shape that is symmetrical around the axis of rotation.