The Slowest Farm Shop #5: Progress on Shaving horse, spring pole lathe, and a mystery tool...

Well, I promised pictures last time, and I have some..I started on the spring pole lathe, which is my big project for this summer/fall, and I decided after much goings on to not make a treadle lathe, meaning in this case continuous motion, but a traditional spring pole lathe, where the piece rotates once or more (hopefully many more) times, then back again. Why? I was inspired by a couple things, like poverty and such, but also after doing months of research into it, it’s just what appeals to me. Robin Wood (yes, that’s his name) has been a big inspiration to me. You can look up his work in several places, including the Assoc. of Pole Turners, and his website http://www.robin-wood.co.uk/ and you simply MUST check out his videos on youtube, most of all the George Lailey bowl video.

So anyway, understanding please that I’ve heard all the positive and negitive stuff about that course of action, I continue… So I decided to start with a log, rather than surfaced lumber. Partly to keep it looking traditional to some extent, I suppose, and partly because I’ve got a ton of maple logs sitting around here that need attending to. So I start out with this:

and start attacking it with froe and mallet..and no, I know I can’t froe this sucker…it’s big…but the froe does make a nice line across the top, which I then attack with a handsaw to give the line some depth. Then I move to hammers and huge chisel, to define some more lines in the wood,

and finally I drawknife some wedges out of waste splinters of maple..the wedges ranged from 10” to 16” long, I’d say, and only one had any kind of taper to it, one was almost round on the end. Doesn’t really matter as long as you can get one end in a crack, and wail on the other with hammers. So after much much much hard work, I have

I don’t have pics of the next step, which was to drawknife, and plane down the open face and sides of each half, to create the two halves of the body. My next steps will be to decide on a couple possible directions for the legs/stand part, whether I want it very free standing, or more like Robin Woods bowl lathe, which has advantages at the cost of space/mobility.

As for the shaving horse, I started off with a piece of pine I had lying around, and would later come to wish I had LEFT lying around. After much pointless dithering about what exactly I should do, I decided that this piece of pine was so miserable, it doesn’t matter much, and if it falls apart, it would probably be for the best. I pretty much put some holes in it, and cut a piece of reclaimed cherry banister from a fancy house ‘round here into lengths (this was a dumpster reclaim…entirely from their dumpster, which I climbed inside of and scrounged, and yes, I had the permission of everybody). and shaped some crude tenons on. Here’s a couple of pics of that…I suuuure wish it wasn’t so rickety, but I think I would of done better on a hardwood seat..this pine was so soft that test fitting with offcuts showed that any mild rubber mallet work driving the legs in would split the thing to bits. Never tried to work with such soft wood, and I don’t think I’ll be holding my breath to in the future. I guess I’m used to southern yellow pine, which is quite a bit harder to me.

But what do I discover somehow today while doing all this? A mystery plane! That’s right, a little plane hiding away in it’s own world of rust. Here it is:

What is it exactly? No idea. It’s so bad I can’t even make out the numbers on it. So it’s soaking in evaporust, and sometime this week I’ll refinish it enough to identify and perhaps use. Yes, I know some people hate that idea, but I’m one of those tools-are-to-be-used-and-honored kinds of guys. And lastly, she doesn’t care about any of this…

-- "That which has in itself the greatest use, possesses the greatest beauty." - Unknown Shaker