Woodturning and the Great Divide

By Bobby Neal Winters

I think it was late March, and I think it was just before spring break. I should’ve noted the date more carefully because history was a-being made, as they say.  I’ll be marking the time of my life from that trip.

I made a trip to the Grizzly Store in Springfield, Missouri.

Words won’t adequately describe it, so I won’t even try.  Let me just say that if you are someone who enjoys the practice of woodworking in any of its manifestations, then this store is a place for you.  It is to woodworking stores as Buc-ee’s is to quick-stop gas stations: The quintessence has been distilled, concentrated, and put into a water tower to the point of overflowing.

Can I compare it to Rocklers? Can I compare it to Woodcraft? Both are fine places. You might as well compare a campfire to a supernova, an M&M to the planet Jupiter made entirely of fudge.

I bought a new lathe there, and then took my wife to Buc-ee’s for lunch.  We should’ve done it the other way around because she insisted on sitting in the truck with the lathe while I fetched us a bit of brisket on a bun.  Not that I think that anyone is going to tuck a 100-pound lathe under their arm and make a run for it, but you never know.

I’ve been on a journey through the World of Wood-Working and only relatively recently have I found myself in the area of wood-turning, the Land of the Lathe.

Before coming into the Land of the Lathe, I discovered that the World of Wood-Working has many surprising divides in it, many borders that are reinforced with land mines and concertina wire.

There is the division between hand tools and power tools, for instance. There are purists on both sides of the divide.  There are those on the hand tool side that will rip boards by hand, eschewing the much more convenient table saw; they will mill up all of their boards by hand, using hand planes and the like instead of planers.  

On the power tool side, there are those, by way of contrast, who will use power tools even for those tasks that are more easily done by hand.  They will use a router to chamfer their edges when a hand plane would do the job better and more safely.

Can you imagine?

For most of us woodworkers, this boundary is like the border between Brazil and Paraguay at Ciudad del Este: As porous as all get out; folks are running back and forth and nobody is checking your passport.

And let’s not even talk about the “pocket hole” divide. Talk about land mines and concertina wire.

And each of these comes with its own hierarchy of practice.

While I do have some strong opinions on each of these, let me just ask in a child-like way, can’t we all just get along?

While I do try to straddle the fence, I do like doing as much with hand tools as can be done easily and well, but once you take up the lathe, you can’t be a hand tool purist anymore.  You are in the middle of downtown power tools.

(I say that, but there are those purists who build and use human-powered lathes. My hat is off to you, but I will give you a little distance because you are--and I mean this in the kindest possible way--crazy.)

The big divide in the world of woodturning, the Land of the Lathe, is that between gouges made of high speed steel and those that are tipped with carbide.

Your project is on your lathe turning at anywhere from 300 to 3000 revolutions per minute and you have your gouge pressed to the wood, creating sawdust at a rate that you’d never believed possible before doing it yourself.  

This works great until the gouge gets dull, but then something needs to be done.

If you use high speed steel, you need to take it over to your slow speed bench grinder and sharpen it.  By way of contrast, if you have a carbide tipped gouge, you can get away with loosening a screw, turning your tip a quarter turn, and then tightening the screw.  I should say, you can do that four times before you have to plop down twenty dollars for a new tip. While you can sharpen a carbide tip, I get the impression that most people don’t.

In case you are wondering, I’ve got both types. The carbide tips are easier to use, but you can’t do as much with them.  I am trying to learn how to use high speed steel, but there is something to be learned there.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.