John Balsillie : Back to Basic’s – Spindle Turning. | South Auckland Woodturners Guild Inc.

Club Meeting: 28 Feb 2025
Report By Cory Wyatt.

John started the demo with a small hand out describing the 4 major spindle working forms: Bead, Cove, Vee, and Straight. As seen below:

From this John moved to the four actions used in spindle turning and how the combination of these actions gets the differing forms.

From Here John moved to showing how these work in making a wig stand shaft (refer to the SAWG link https://sawg.org.nz/sawg/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Spindles-for-Wig-Stands.pdf).

Wig Stand Shaft

Starting by marking centres, placing between centres on the lathe, moving the rest to slightly below centre lining up with the bed, before checking the spacing with the lathe off with his spindle roughing gouge.

From here he started rounding off the timber with the tool at an approximate 45-degree angle starting in from the edge and moving to the end to avoid chipping the end. Showing the gouge was held on with two fingers and making small frequent cuts during the rounding process.

He used a 25mm spanner to remove the material at either end of the stand where they will be attached to the base and head. Note the club generally uses a 26mm Forstner bit for these holes, so please adjust to meet the tooling that you use. The ends of these cuts were then under cut to ensure a good fit on the base and head with a spindle gouge.

John marked up the shaft with his design and used a skew with a small vee cut to mark up his lines for his beads and coves.

Making Beads: Using either a spindle gouge or skew, you cut away from your high point rolling down to your low point. Best down in small cuts if not comfortable with larger cuts. By finishing with a vertical spindle gouge this means the wings do not hit the other side of the cut.

Making Coves: Start with a V cut and move towards the lowest point of the cut making small cuts. You are cutting downhill for an easy definition.

Making Skew Cuts: Roll the body and work towards the lowest point of the cut, remember that your tool rest hight is normally higher for your skew than your spindle gouge. There is no issue with changing between a spindle gouge and skew.

Door Stop

John moved on to his next project and described the two ways to make a door stop. Firstly, you can make a single stop and once turned you use a saw to remove the waste wood. Or you can make a double ended stop and cut in half. Either way the turning is the same.

You start by Turning your square end into a ball or large bead, as described above with a slight rounding of the inner edge with a v cut.

This is needed to make the bead and looks attractive, once done you can either turn the other end for a double stopper or take straight to the saw for a single. These can be made with either the skew or spindle gouge.