On day 25 of our meetings, a long-handled drinking bowl was on the agenda. The standard lathe required some modifications for this. The bar, which normally supports your tools while turning, would have to be positioned quite far from the bowl due to the long, swinging handle. This presents two problems. The first is that the lathe isn’t designed to allow the support to be positioned so far from the lathe’s axes. The second problem is that, even if it were possible, your support would be so far from the point where you’re actually cutting, leaving little stability. Fortunately, we had come up with a solution for this. We just hoped it would work.
In the first photo above, you can see the solution we envisioned. Instead of a support running parallel to the axles, we added a third head between the two existing poppets. This would theoretically allow us to easily reach the bowl with our hook tools, and give the handle room to rotate freely. No sooner said than done. Because it was an experiment, we temporarily secured the head with a clamp.
After marking out the desired shape on the wood and carving it out with the axe, we could start turning. The third head proved to be an excellent solution to the tool rest problem. The bowl could be turned perfectly without any problems from the handle swinging around.
In a future version, we’d like to make the third head so it can be secured with a wedge instead of a clamp, like the other heads. We’d also add something that would allow you to vary the head’s height.
