Sorry to hear of your tribulations.

Normal woodworkers do a lot of planning, drawing, measuring... Turners do a whole lot less
(or none) of those things. For many turning projects just charging ahead without much
preparation works. For other turning projects -- lamps for example -- it doesn't. You need
to see ahead to what the problems will be -- getting a hole down the center for the hardware
and wire, attaching the base and hardware, etc. Additionally, we need to determine how we
are going to hold the work to the lathe -- none of these are trivial.

It would seem that a good place to start would be the library -- likely there is at least one
book with a plan for a lamp. I have an old book of turning projects written years ago by
somebody's shop teacher. The suggested turning tools and methods (scraping mainly) would
make you cringe but there is still much to be learned from the book although you would never
be tempted to make even one of the included projects.

Another useful thing to do is to sit down with pencil and paper, draw something which is
close to the desired shape and see where the glue joints and figure are going to end up.
Anyway, this would be a start.

Bill

In article , says...
Hello all,

This evening, I had the basically sound idea that I should turn a
lamp... I went out and got the hardware and decided that the plank of
bird's eye maple I had down in the shop would look great as a lamp
base. So, I got the blank cut to size and ready for assembly (I'm
using all kiln-dried lumber for now, so most or all of my blanks are
laminated) I figured that it'd be a whole lot easier to run the wires
through the finished lamp if I left a space in the center, so I cut a
half inch out of the middle of the center plank, and made some nice
plugs for each end to set the centers into. Seemed like a good idea
at the time, but it turns out that the hole in the center really
should be square, and not .75 x .5!

So, I got it up on the lathe, and started turning away. Everything
was basically fine except for a bit of extra vibration, until I turned
off the lathe to check my progress. Turns out that bit of extra
vibration caused the panels to crack apart about 1/32 of an inch in
four spots right in the most prominant space on the lamp. The cracks
are about 4" long, and approximately 1/16" deep.

I tried sanding the sucker for alomst an hour with 60 grit to no
avail, and any attempts to cut or scrape the area just makes the gaps
wider and deeper. And as an extra kick in the pants, most of the
bird's eyes turned right out of the blank- so it just looks like
regular maple with a little curl to it.

I doubt I'm going to save this piece unless I just fill it with wood
putty and paint it, but I was wondering if any of you folks have had
similar problems, and what my best options for avoiding this in the
future may be...

Thanks!
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