Chess set

My daughter has been asking me for a long time (about four years) to turn her a chess set. I have never been very keen as I considered it to be boring and spindle turning is not one of my strong points. I realised that the only possibility would be to do it during my holiday. Anyway the 16 pawns are finished, my spindle gouge and skew skills are busy improving with every piece. The wood is Maple for the light pieces and Wallnut for the dark pieces, sanded to 600 grit, finished with three coats of Woodoc 5 to bring out the colour and wood grain. Finally it is polished with Atique wax.

Holiday projects

This year I decided to take my Nova lathe with me to my holiday home at Jongensfontein. The plan is to leave it there so that I can do some turning during my holidays. I left with quite a load on my Toyota bakkie, lathe, tools, wood, etc.on the 1400 km journey. I slept over in Beaufort West and left at 5 AM for the last part of my journey where I photographed the sunrise with my Iphone, absolutely beautiful.

Next was to unload, assemble and organise the garage as my workshop

In the next post I will give more detail on my holiday project

New lathe: Jet 1221VS

The new Jet 1221VS midi lathe just arrived in South Africa and I have been looking for a while for a lathe that I can use for demonstration purposes. After evaluating the lathe at the Hardware Center open day, I was impressed with this lathe and one week later had one of them in my workshop. Unfortunately the lathe came with a M33 spindle where my other lathes are 1 and 1/4 but I fitted a M33 to 1" adaptor and then my Nova chuck with a 1" insert. Not optimum but the best I could do for now, later I may get myself a chuck directly threaded for M33. I turned some Jacaranda bowls to test the lathe and was satisfied with my purchase.