Choosing the lathe and tools you need for a great start in woodturning!

Are you a beginning turner? Here's the distilled advice from today's leading woodturners about how to select your lathe, what turning tools to buy and how to sharpen them properly, and what chucks and other accessories you need. You can't go wrong with shop-tested advice selected from the pages of American Woodturner, journal of the American Association of Woodturners.

Lathes and turning tools are expensive, nobody has an unlimited budget to spend on equipping a woodturning workshop, and nobody wants to make a bad mistake by purchasing the wrong equipment. This book will save you money and frustration, and help you get off to a great start, with stories that include:

• A worksheet and checklist for buying your first lathe, sources you probably never thought of, and a complete survey of dream machines to which you might graduate as you progress.
• How to maintain your lathe and how to make sure its headstock and tailstock are correctly aligned.
• Full detail on the differences between bowl gouges, detail gouges, and spindle roughing gouges, how to choose them, and how to grind their edges to be most effective.
• The complete rundown on parting tools and scrapers, which real woodturners really do use to good effect.
• How to select and set up sharpening equipment, and how to use it to put a perfect edge on every kind of turning tool.
• How to hold the workpiece on the lathe safely and securely, using driving spurs, inexpensive faceplates, and shop-made chucks.
• Do you really need that expensive scroll chuck? Not to start out with. But once you do add one of those beauties, you’ll want to know how to get the most out of it.