- Hey kids.

My name is Adam with the Arkansas Regional Innovation Hub, Arkansas's first makerspace.

A makerspace is where we have a bunch of tools in one location.

You can come in and get to use our tools to make whatever you want to make.

Today, we're going to talk about a very special type of tool.

It's called a wood lathe.

A wood lathe, which is kind of a weird word.

It's spelt L A T H E, lathe.

It will spin a piece of wood around super fast, and then you take a sharpened chisel and you put it up against it.

And that sharp chisel as it's spinning, slowly cuts away the wood so it makes the shape that you want it to make.

So I bet you guys are wondering what all you can make with a wood lathe.

There's tons and tons of different things that you make with a wood lathe.

Baseball bats are made on wood lathes, wooden bowls like this one were made on a wood lathe.

You can make legs for chairs.

You can make legs for tables.

Anything that's end result is round is made on a wood lathe.

Today, we're gonna make something like this.

This is a honey dipper, and you use it to dip honey out and put it on your toast or your cereal in the morning.

Keeps your fingers from getting all sticky.

And it's something that we're going to make today from a single piece of wood.

Let's get started.

The most important thing with all of this stuff in the wood shop here is always wear your eye protection.

Either pair of glasses, like these, something that has something that will protect you from the side also, cause it doesn't always come straight at your face.

Sometimes you get dust and pieces that come into the side or in the case of a wood lathe, you want a full face shield, like this.

See, always want to make sure to wear all your safety equipment.

All right, now let's go ahead and talk about our tools.

These are our chisels right here.

First type of tool we're gonna talk about is this.

This is a gouge and this is made to take a lot of material all at once.

It digs in right there and just pushes all the wood out.

Mostly it's gonna remove the bulk of the wood.

And then, after you get it kind of shaped to where you want, you use some tools like this right here, it's called a skew, and you can use this one to shape your wood a little bit more delicately.

It's got the tip here and that'll dig in and you can cut little lines and do a lot of detail work with your tip.

And then to cut these little, these little pieces here where the honey gets stuck in, you use this right here.

This is another type of chisel.

It's called a cut off chisel, but you don't have to cut all the way through your wood with it.

You can just cut into your wood.

And if you'll notice this one fits right inside these grooves.

All right, so now we've got the wood lathe set up over here.

You're probably asking yourself, how am I going to turn something this size into this.

First thing you have to do is cut it down a little bit.

We used our band saw earlier to cut down the other half of this one into this first.

This is the first thing you do is you make one of these and then you put this on a wood lathe and you make it into a simple round section.

So this piece has already been rounded over.

And this now is already starting to look a lot more like this.

All right.

So now we're going to go ahead and put our blank into the wood lathe.

So you start doing that by taking this piece right here on the end, putting it in the very middle, right there on this little pin, right here.

And then, this piece slides and it pushes right into the middle on this side.

Push it real tight and lock it down right here.

So as we explained before, this wood lathe is gonna spin this piece of wood really, really fast.

And then you're gonna take your chisel, put it on this tool rest, and it's gonna spin and cut that wood just like it is right there.

(chiseling) (upbeat music) As you can see where we're taking shape, we're starting to get some good shape in here.

Do you think you could tell which side is the handle and which side's the dipper for the honey?

Let's get those detail tools out and finish up this honey dipper.

(upbeat music) (chiseling) There it is.

Brand new honey dipper.

I told you there was all sorts of fun things that we can make on a wood lathe.

So if you ever want to come over do some more fun woodworking with us, just come on over here to the Innovation Hub.

All right, I'll see you later.