Turned wood box with lid

Turned a little box using ambrosia maple. Finished it with hemp oil. All turned from one piece of wood. Also inlayed a small button of abalone shell in top of knob on lid.

Turn lidded boxes on the lathe

This blog is about turning lidded boxes on the lathe.

I mounted a 3 X 3, 6 inch long pieces of spalted maple. I turned this round to about 2 1/2 inch diameter. Turned round using a roughing gouge. The block is held in place by a spur center and a live center on the other end.

At his point, I start to shape the lid and mark the lid location.

I use a parting to to cut a grove, where my lid will later be cut off.

Here the lid is being shaped. I used a skew to do most of this shaping, You can also see, I have made a indented grove on the top to be held in place using my four jaw chuck.

I use a four jaw chuck from Teknatool.

I have remounted the lid after cutting it off using a parting tool.

I am using the mini sorby hollowing tool for hollowing out the lid.

This is a great little tool and the handle is inter changable to use a skew and a spindle gouge.

Here is where I hollow out the body and size the opening for the lip to fit just right. I use both a caliper and trail and error to get the perfect snug fit on the lid.

I latter turn an ebony knob and glue into the top. This a nice little afternoon project. I use semi green wood. My lathe is a teknatool Nova. Most of my tools are sorby.

Microwave drying wood pen blanks

The method I use to dry green pen blanks is microwave drying of the pen blanks.

When I need to dry pens blanks in a very short time, I use the following method.

I have a small Microwave oven I use only for drying wood. I do not use the microwave in the kitchen. I don't think my wife would be very happy if I did.

1. I cut the blanks into blank size usually 3/4" X 5" long.

2. I stack these in a way the air will flow freely around the blank.

3. I weight each blank and write the weight on the side of the blank. I use a digital postal scale. I picked up a scale off ebay for about $25

4. I place 8-9 blanks in the microwave in this fashion.

5. I microwave the blanks on low heat for 2 1/2 minutes.

6. I remove the blanks and the set on top of the microwave to cool.

7. They need to cool for 7-10 minutes.

8. I then weight the blanks again and write new weight on side

9. I go through this process a minimum of 3 times or until these is no longer a weight lost.

10. At this point I let set over night before processing the pen blanks.

Note; the microwave will set the blanks on fire, from the inside.

As you can see from the picture at the right. This blank caught on fire from the inside. I cut it apart and you can see how it burned.

Microwave drying will work must be done with care.

I used this to dry wood for 200 pens. I used this on maple wood blanks that had just been cut.

Please visit my web site for more woodworking infromation. http://nokeswoodworks.com