Making weird stuff: Making toggles from the old elm tree

Here are some toggles I made recently for the blinds in our house.

They are made from elm. The wood for this came from a tree that was in our garden when we moved in, but subsequently died due to dutch elm disease.

In situ...

These were turned on my mini lathe. Here you can see the lumps of wood I used. I had cut these off the timber I had previously converted from the tree. This has been seasoning in the shed for about a year, so was pretty stable. Elm is generally a strong and stable wood, so it is good for this.

The first job was to fit a spindle in one end to fit in the lather chuck. Here's the pilot hole being drilled.

A bolt was threaded into the pilot hole, nice and tightly. Clamping a set of mole grips on the bolt head is a good way to do this. Quick and easy.

Once in, the bolt head was sawn off with an angle grinder

...to leave the spindle.

You can just about see the burr that the grinder leaves. To remove it, I chamfered the end slightly, so it would fit smoothly into the chuck.

Then it was fitted into the lathe. The spindle end is on the left. the right hand end is held in place by a conical piece in the tail stock. This supports the wood.

You can see that one side of the piece is almost a finger thicker than the opposite side of the piece.

(You can also see the beetle tracks that came from the underside of the elm bark!)

While it was safe-ish to spin the piece like this under no load, it is not a good idea to try to start turning when the piece is this eccentric. The rotational balance of something this way off centre produces a lot of kick back when you start using the chisels, which could be enough to dislodge the piece. This is not good. It's also not great for the bearings of the lathe.

Here is a test spin I did, to see how off centre the piece was: eerrmmm, VERY!

So, using the arbortech, I trimmed the piece down roughly while stationary, until it was much closer to an even cylinderical shape. This made it much more stable when rotated and subsequently much safer.

All the chisels described here were especially chunky turning-chisel with long handles. Normal chisels are too weak for turning and may snap. Also long handles give much more leverage and make the cutting easier to control (and thus safer).

Incidentally, I made all these handles from scratch. the handles for them were also turned on the same lathe. The wood is, from left to right:
Ash, yew, ash, walnut, ash, walnut, yew.

Once I had the piece roughly cylindrical it was just a case of turning the piece down to an actual uniform cylinder. The first part was a rough pass. This chunky low profile gouge chisel is excellent for this.

The gouge strips the wood off quickly and easily, but doesn't leave a very straight edge...

...so once roughly cylindrical I swapped it for a similarly chunky, but straight-edged chisel.

This chisel leaves a straight edge, but it rips the grain and leaves it quite rough. So, while the piece was now cylindrical, it needed sanding smooth, starting with a coarse 60 grit paper.

After sanding with the 60-grit graded paper, I swapped to progressively finer graded grits until the cylinder was nice and smooth.
I also used a 120 grit paper, but obviously forgot to take photo of that!

Now the piece was smoothly cylindrical, I could mark out lines that indicate how long each toggle was. This is easy to do while spinning the piece, using a softish carpenters pencil.

Then the rest of it was turning all the toggles evenly to roughly the same pattern.
The darker lines were cut using a hacksaw. Here, I'm shaping the end-curve with an angled chisel.

Here are the toggles, all still attached as one spindle. You can see that the chisel cuts have left the newly formed shapes rough again.

Although it is not shown here, these needed sanding smooth as the spindle had previously. Again, this meant starting with rough 60-grit paper, then 80, 120. 240 and 400.

Once smooth, the piece looked like this.