Tools For Working Wood

Every day I am at work I spent at least 15 minutes - more like 30 minutes -a day using the showroom treadle lathe. I would do more but I don't have time. And this was the point of designing the lathe in the first place: I need the exercise. Using the lathe, I break a sweat; I can feel my heartbeat go up; and I can feel the improvement in my stamina. I hate going to the gym, and at this point I don't pretend that this New Year will be different. But this is different. I focus on my goal of learning to turn properly and the time just slips by. Eventually my goal is to make certain items. I have a list but I am not skilled enough yet.

And this is what will bring me to the lathe in the future - interest in turning. The important physical benefit is frosting. Consequently I don't have to negotiate with myself, resort to post-workout bribery or make complicated podcast or music playlists to distract myself from (what I experience to be) the monotony of gym exercising.

But there is a learning curve.

Turning in general has a learning curve, but I am also learning the important aspects of turning on a treadle lathes. Pedaling is one example. I am now at the point where I routinely switch feet. I am learning how to position my body so that I am not in the way of moving the tool in a cut - yet still be able to pedal comfortably. I am is getting better, but I am not yet where I need to be, or where I hope to be within a few weeks.

I also had my first accident today. It was pure stupidity and carelessness, as accidents sometimes are. If I had been using an electric lathe, I might have lost a thumb. I was rounding out square stock and stopped pedaling so I could see where I was and I touched the wood to see if it was round. It was far from it and my thumb was dragged and stuck between the work and the tool rest. This was totally avoidable mistake and it served as a real wake-up call. Fortunately instead of causing an emergency trip to the hand surgeon, the accident just caused a mild pain at the base of my thumbnail. I don't even think I will lose the nail.

I counted myself lucky and finished roughing out.

Update on manufacture: We are basically done assembling all the bits and bobs that go into the lathe. The Treadle Lathe is the largest and most complicated hand tool project I can think of by any manufacturer in several generations. We are dealing with multiples of over 100 different parts. All of the parts with three exceptions are sitting here waiting to be assembled. The parts that are missing are a few of the headstocks - we had a CNC milling crash last week and we lost a few days waiting for the machine to be repairs. That's done. We don't feel comfortable finishing the tailstocks until we have assembled a production machine and double- checked the actual center distance from the ways. (It would be just foolish to make an assumption.) And finally the welded frames were supposed to be shipped to us last Wednesday but the trucking company confused bills of lading, reported our shipment picked up and on schedule when in fact it was just sitting at the fabricator. In theory, by the time you read this we will either have frames or we will be waiting for a truck to pull up, which will be followed by a mad dash to assemble the machines. If you have signed up as a pre-sale buyer, you will then get your call to arrange delivery, although that last bit may not happen until January because most of our shop people are on vacation Christmas Week.

We still have lots of work to do on manuals and videos.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying: I expect to spend more time turning and be a better turner in better physical shape starting now.

A customer of ours, Konstantin, carves and whittles and gave us at the shop a wonderful carving a bird that is a composed of a series of whittled fans. It's all two pieces of wood, one the body and tail, the other the wings.

This is a traditional carving and the wings of the bird are made up of feathers which are carved by cutting the profile of the feathers and then slitting the profile into individual feathers, and twisting them so they lie flat and interlock.

The bird is an extremely charming piece of work and we thank Konstantine for letting us keep it. It's hanging out on the checkout counters - so come by and take a look.

If you are interested in this type of carving and whittling, the best book I know of on the subject is one I have had since I was a kid. Whittling and Woodworking by E. J. Tangerman is a comprehensive volume on all aspects of whittling, with practical examples, and also all styles of carving. The best part is that a lot of the samples of traditional carving are from pieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and are still on display there.

A partial selection of our Osmo display

Lets face it, carrying niche products entails a lot of explaining and the explaining runs the gamut from the considered to the absurd. We have callers who need help to figure out which sander is right for them. We also find ourselves giving detailed product instructions to callers who have made their purchases on Amazon and despaired of understanding what they bought. We have fielded questions from callers who want us to color-match their furniture on the basis of their description (its a nice rich brown) or help them find replacement parts for perfectly fine hand tools they just bought at a yard sale that need a blade or a part.

There are obvious limits to our ability to answer every question, but we do try to share our knowledge. And admittedly some of our products can be confusing. For example, customers who come to our combination showroom - warehouse - workshop in Brooklyn will be greeted by a display of Osmo finishes. Osmo is a wonderful product line, but its names can be confusing (no, Polyx is not polyurethane and Wood Wax Finish is not a finishing wax) and the color of the name panel on the can has nothing to do with the can's contents color. Enter The Explainer.

The Explainer for Osmo gives an overview of the product line, and the pros and cons of different methods of application. We try to capture feedback from everyone: our own experiences and our customers experiences; highlights from long exchanges with our Osmo rep; tips from YouTube videos that actually worked; instructions in tiny print that might otherwise be overlooked. The point of The Explainer is to distill the range of accurate information and make it practical and actionable.

We often have questions ourselves, perhaps as a product changes over time. Festool, for example, has drastically expanded its offerings of cordless tools - including two cordless vacuums. How do you use these cordless tools in tandem with corded tools (especially the vac and tool combo)? Enter the latest addition to The Explainer.

The point of the Explainers is to get to the point as fast as possible. There is a lot of text involved, but you can use the search function to get to just the part that answers your particular question. We know that some pictures or videos would be welcome in many of the listings (and some videos and blog posts with pictures are included in The Explainer section) but that getting just the right photo would slow the process down enormously. Updating info with the inevitable changes to products and product mixes is challenging enough.

Here is the complete list of our list of our Explainers which are also easily accessible through one of the main menu picks on our website.

Explaining with words also has made us more appreciative of explanatory signage. Here are some of our favorite signs from our showroom.


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Making a tap guide for my lathe turret.
Of all the tools we manufacture the drafting rules are my favorite. I have one that I use everyday. It's the rule I use when I'm measuring something because of a customer query, if I'm trying to find the right stock to make a part, or if I have to part something off on a lathe to make sure it's the right length. Now the difference between a drafting rule and a regular rule is that the drafting rule has thin edge, which gets it close to the thing you are measuing or layout and and there is less parralax error. Ours version also has end grads, which is really handy for measuring short things when you simply don't have space for the entire length of the ruler. This is very handy when I am working on the lathe.

Starrett used to make a drafting rule, and I have one and that's where we got the idea that maybe we should reintroduce it. The Starrett drafting rule only had a bevel on one edge, ours has a cove which looks and feels nicer but more importantly it means if you press down on the one side of the ruler the other side lifts up and it's easier to pick it up.
So a few years ago we started making them. We discovered we had no idea what we were doing. When you mill the cove on one side the brass wants to buckle and the scrap rate was horrendous. So when we ran out of initial batch we stopped making them. About 2 years ago, we ordered material to make more of them, thinking we would do it better. But we gave up pretty quickly.
We still have the stock, and I have another idea about fixturing, but hustling to produces Gramercy Tools Treadle Lathes, I just haven't had the time to figure out if we have a good path. Maybe next year if I have time. However, we found a very small number of English rulers (8) buried in the warehouse that we didn't know we had, along with two English / metric (2) rules. We just put them up for sale now. If you've been jonesing for one now is your chance. Click here.

In other news this past weekend I once again visited the Poster House Museum to see there awesome exhibit "The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy". This was eyeopening to me as I never really understood much about Fascist Italy before WW2.




PS