Tips on mini wood lathe project

1. Always choose appropriate woods for your projects. Woods with excessive resinous oil sap, knotty, splinter nature, or very high moisture contents do not tend to give good results for beginner wood turners.
2. Make sure to keep your work area brightly lit and clean.
3. Allow lots of practice time. This is machine-assisted hand work, and perfect results cannot be expected overnight. As people says practice make perfect.
4. Keep your knives/chisels sharp!
5. Stop your work piece frequently to inspect, measure, and make comparisons to templates while turning. Once you have removed too much wood from the work piece, you have a very labor intensive piece of firewood.
6. Start small, projects like yo yos, tops, and drumsticks because it use small, inexpensive piece of lumber and it does not costly if you make a mistake
7. Look for non-typical wood for turning. Tree limbs, gnarly wood too tough to split, scrap lumber, and other sources can give you an excellent variety of turning stock.
8. Use measuring tools for repeat projects. Calipers and templates allow you to reproduce a design repeatedly.
9. Buy the highest quality turning tools you can afford, and buy an assortment for different turning tasks. This will ensure you got the perfect result for the project.
10. Always keep close watch in case of an emergency.

Tools For Mini Wood Lathe.

There are several cutting tools for mini wood lathe which are:

Lathe tools are called knives or chisels. They shape is long, round, curved handles to afford a solid grip and sufficient leverage to enable the turner to control the cutting edge accurately with minimal fatigue. Here are a few of the many types turning tools you may find:

1. Gouges. These usually have specially shaped cutting edges for performing particular cuts, such as bowl gouges, with concave, curved cutting edges to form the smooth, curved surface of a bowl, orvee, or knurling gouges for cutting grooves or knurls in wooden spindles.
2. Scrapers. These are often flat or slightly curved chisels for removing wood from flat or cylindrical shapes, or for roughing out a shape.
3. Spoon cutters have a spoon shaped cutting edge and are also often used forshaping bowls.
4. Other tools you may encounter are skew chisels, fluted gouges, spindle gouges, and nose chisels.

Component of Mini Wood Lathe Machine.

For a basic lathe and also including Mini wood lathe consist of  3 components which is Headstock, tailstock, and tool rest. Here are the function of each parts:




1) Headstock

Consist of the drive train, including the motor, pulleys, belts, and spindle, and for a right handed turner, will be located on the left end of the lathe. Mounted on the end of the headstock facing the tailstock is the spindle and the spur center or for face turning such as bowls and plates, or other flat or face work, the face plate assembly.

2) Tailstocks

Is the free spinning end of the lathe, and has the tailstock spindle and the cup center, as well as a hand-wheel or other feature for clampingor securing the work piece between the lathe centers.

3) Tool Rest

It is similar to a mechanical arm with a metal guide bar to support the chisel or knife used for turning the work piece. It usually can be adjusted by sliding the length of the bed at its base, with an intermediate arm that can swing from a parallel to a perpendicular position in relation to the lathe bed, and the upper arm, which holds the actual tool rest bar. This assembly has as many as three swivel joints, all of which tighten with a setscrew or clamp to keep it secure while turning is in progress.

Although some of the people feel that al the information above seems not important and a lot of them neglected on knowing it because what matter for them is they can produce wood product and that its. But believe me with this information you can know more on the capability of your machine without reading its manual; seriously. Beside that it also can help you in finding or buying  what is the suitable mini wood lathe machine for your project.    

What Is Mini Wood Lathe?

Mini wood lathe is a wood turning machine that is smaller than average industrial quality wood lathe. Basically mini wood lathe is do-your-self type of machine where by you can do small job in wood turning projects.Mini wood lathe  are built to do small jobs, so you cannot push the machine to do heavyweight kind of project because the outcome may not be as you expected. You should read the machine manual so that you know what maximum size of wood that you can use safely.

Because the size of the machine is small, you does need to have any well custom workshop to place the machine and you can simply place it at any corner of your room. Another thing is the weight of mini wood lathe is a little bit lighter than standard wood lathe. In that case it easier for the machine to be carry because it fit into the boot of any car.

If you want to know what kind of job you can do with the machine, feel free to watch the video below: