Woodturning History

Woodturning is an ancient craft known to many cultures worldwide. For many hundreds of years leading up to the Industrial Revolution, the foot-powered woodturning lathe was the only woodworking machine in common use.

Automated industrial production has since replaced many items traditionally made in turning shops. Today, small-scale turning shops and individual artisans produce limited quantities of functional spindle and faceplate turnings, as well as one-of-a-kind art pieces. In many parts of the world, lathes are small and portable, so turners can travel to the source of the wood or set up in a temporary work space. A skilled turner can produce a wide variety of objects with five or six simple tools, and the tools can even be reshaped easily for the task at hand.

Today’s turners find work making prototypes and molds, restoring furniture, continuing folk art traditions, and creating fine crafts for art galleries.

Turning Between Centers

Spindles for furniture, chairs, spinning wheels and stair rails

by Ernie Conover

The lathe is amongst the oldest of machines. At its simplest, all that is required is a set of centers, a sharp tool, and some means of revolving the work. A piece of twine can do the revolving part. While most turners today envision wrapping the twine around the work and tying a bowline into which the turner inserts his foot, it was actually attached to a long stick that greatly multiplied the short stroke possible with the foot alone. Once at the bottom of the stroke, a spring pulls the twine back to the starting position. A readily available spring is a tree branch, either still on the tree or mounted above (or in some cases below) the lathe in the shop, hence the name “spring pole lathe.” By medieval times the pole was often replaced by a longbow with halves of the string going through off-center holes in a spool. The rigging was arranged so that turning the spool compressed the bow. When the force was eased the bow would turn the spool in the opposite direction to the starting place. The whole affair worked much like a modern window shade without click stops.

Early turners did not have the luxury of a table saw or band saw, so had to reduce their billets by splitting the wood from a clear log of suitable length—a process called riving. The turner first pounds wedges into the end of the log, to split it into usable segments, and then further rives these pieces with a froe before further reducing the riven piece to something approaching round with a drawknife. A great advantage to riven stock is that all grain fibers are parallel, so a very strong finished turning results. The dainty proportions of Windsor chairs are the results of riving. The entire process, bucking the log, riving, and turning, are done with the wood green. The wood works much easier green and as long as a complete annular ring is not encompassed in the billet, checking will not be a problem. Once dry the turning will be slightly oval due to the differences in tangential and radial shrinkage but not noticeably so to the eye. Ovalness can only be discerned by touch or mechanical measurement.

I have turned a fair amount on a pole lathe and the exercise brings much understanding of turning itself. First and foremost your tools have to be razor sharp or you do not get much work done. Since one or the other foot has to be treadling, you have to stand on the other leg, but your hands are in contact with the tool rest, either directly or through the tool. Because of the hand contact, I find balance not to be a problem though I do switch feet frequently. Most who know a little about human powered lathes will tell you that you have to back the tool away on the reverse stroke. In fact, on normal cuts with a gouge or a planing cut with a skew, you do not. For other cuts, such as incising a groove with the toe of a skew chisel, you do. You do not really withdraw the tool so much as ease up the pressure. It is a matter of timing and once you set up a rhythm it becomes second nature.

A second type of lathe was the great wheel lathe where an assistant (likely a serf in Europe or a slave in southern America) turned the wheel, which delivers constant rotary motion. I have turned on the great wheel lathe at Colonial Williamsburg with volunteers from the audience providing the locomotion, and there is no essential difference from turning on a modern lathe. A nicety of the Williamsburg great wheel is a sort of bench connected to the lathe frame just behind the turner. You sit or lean on it and it is a very comfortable way to turn. I have wondered if this would be a good scheme for a modern lathe, especially if the turner possessed physical handicaps. You take some of the weight off your feet and you can slide readily left or right to control the tool.

The treadle lathe also provides constant rotary motion at the spindle but lacks much power. Therefore treadles were the province of metal and ornamental lathes, where diameters were small. Ornamental turning is a cross between metal turning and woodturning and dates to the 17th century, becoming a well-established hobby for the wealthy aristocrat during the 18th century. Ornamental turning is a whole subculture of turning and one can devote a lifetime to this fascinating pastime.

A well established trade

An important thing for the modern turner to realize is that by 1600 turning was a well established trade. By this time turning lathes (and their accoutrements) were quite sophisticated. Lathes with live spindles are documented in Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises, published in numerous editions between 1627 and 1700. Various ornamental lathes with advancing spindles and eccentrics to actuate them, are also detailed. The art of hand-chasing threads in the lathe had been perfected. Turners worked extensively with materials other than wood, including bone, ivory, horn, tortoise shell, and brass. This is all to say that turning was completely figured out by 1750, and Charles Plumier’s The Art of Turning, published in 1749, has more information than most modern turning books.

Even with crude lathes, the turner’s output was very sophisticated. Mannerist furniture of the 1600s was heavily embellished with turnings of robust proportions and great variation in diameter. Turned elements included complicated legs, bun feet, supporting columns, and split turnings. Interestingly split turnings appear to have been done by paper-joining the two halves to a thin strip of wood. The reason for this was probably that the turner could chuck the resulting glue-up between dead centers without the paper joint prematurely splitting. Many of these decorative half-turnings were ebonized black to increase their visual impact. While today we tend to think of 17th century furniture as shoe-polish brown, it was actually highly colorful, but the colors were highly fugitive.

The next style of furniture was William and Mary. Although William and Mary reigned from 1689 to 1702 (jointly until Mary’s death from smallpox in 1694) the style lasted until about 1725, and probably longer here in the Colonies. William and Mary furniture is characterized by heavy, bulbous turned legs ending in ball feet. Since America was an English colony, taste in furniture emanated from London. Furniture became more refined during the 18th century. Georgian furniture in all its permutations, Chippendale, Hepplewhite, Adam (Federal) and Sheraton, employed turning extensively. All the vogue in the early years of the new republic, Federal style is noted for turnings of fine proportion, often reeded or fluted, and hardly the work of yokels.

The Windsor chair was America’s first affordable seating, selling for a Yankee dollar when that was a day’s wages. It employed many the turner full time, both in the Colonies and in England. The last decade of the 18th century saw the birth of the Empire style, which featured turned elements in the legs and, in a throwback to the previous century, split turnings as embellishments.

One product that incorporated a lot of turning and was always in high demand throughout the Colonial period and late into the 19th century was the spinning wheel. Early in the Colonial period textiles were imported. In fact, the Crown forbade the export of weaving equipment from England. But the need for textiles was huge, so a thriving black market sprang up for looms and spinning wheels. Most looms were crafted by timber framers in between house and barn raisings. Spinning wheels were a product of cabinet shops and talented woodworker/farmers—in this era few people made their entire income from a single pursuit.

Both the great (or wool) wheel and the Saxony (or double band) wheel are principally constructed of turnings. The great wheel I made for my wife Susan some years ago incorporates thirty-seven turnings, all socketed into one another or into the plank table. I know of one Canadian wheel in which the table itself was a large diameter turning, making the whole affair look much like a praying mantis. A four-foot diameter wheel, usually of twelve spokes, powered the great wheel. Always standing, the spinner powered the great wheel with one hand and drew the wool with the other. Once a length of fiber had been spun, she had to reverse the wheel to wind the thread onto the spindle.

Most commonly used for flax, the smaller Saxony wheel was powered by foot treadles, leaving the spinner seated with both hands to draw fiber. The double drive band of the Saxony rotated the bobbin at a higher speed than the flyer. After a length of flax had been spun, the spinner simply eased tension for it to be immediately taken up onto the bobbin. The eldest daughter was responsible for spinning until her marriage. The term spinster comes from women who chose a life sentence of spinning instead of a life sentence of marriage.

The trade fades away

The 19th century saw human-power lathes gradually fade away (although they were used into the 20th century in some rural areas). Water power, the steam engine, and the gas engine provided undreamed of power and spindles that turned in one direction. I have often theorized that the Victorians used turnings so extensively in furniture simply because they could. After the Revolution just about every public, and a good many private, buildings were made in the Greek Revival style. This neoclassical style spoke to the egalitarian values of the new republic and turned Greek columns are its hallmark. Usually coopered, columns provided lots of work for 19th century turning shops. If you think your Oneway lathe is big, you should see the behemoths that resided in Victorian shops. I have a photo of the turner Burt Thompson, his brother, and his father lying inside a column that they turned in their shop in Mississauga, Ontario, in the early 20th century.

Victorian turning shops also turned a lot of ivory into a wide range of useful items. A mainstay was sewing items such as thimbles, lace bobbins, pincushions, and handles for tools of every kind. They turned ivory measured droppers, tubes with a shoulder to accept a cork that were used for anything from dispensing hair tonic to mixing medicine. All billiard balls were handturned from ivory until just after World War I. Just like wood, ivory shrinks as it dries. Therefore, a billiard ball was turned rough and allowed to dry for six months. It was then refined and allowed to age a further six months before it could be trued to perfect and sold.

The second half of the 19th century saw the advent of the copy lathe, the death knell for hand turning. Although people still eke out an existence from hand turning, today the craft is being kept alive in the basements and garage workshops of America. The majority of interest is in faceplate turning—almost all bowls. I often get a student who is keen to start a business turning bowls. Since you are competing against bowls made in the Third World that retail for as little as $35, this is a tough row to hoe. I always reply, “Why ruin a perfectly good hobby?” Oddly enough, custom spindle turning is one specialty where one might make a decent living. There is an ongoing demand for replacement spindles for furniture and architectural columns, balusters, and newel posts. Since a newel post in oak turned on an automatic lathe costs about $125, a client will think nothing of paying $175 for a custom-turned one that perfectly matches an existing staircase. While the buyer of a bowl will want it bigger, smaller, or from a different species of wood, the architect or homeowner will simply ask how soon you can have it done. I can turn one in about a half hour—less time than preparing the billet and sweeping up the mess afterward.

Ernie Conover, a founding member of the AAW, was its first treasurer. He has written seven books about woodturning and woodworking.

The Oliver Machine Company

Muscle machines from 1903 to 1999

by Alan Lacer

Are you looking for a lathe with a little more oomph than your midi lathe? Maybe the 62-foot Oliver 18-A pictured above would fill the bill. Or perhaps you could drop a towering Oliver faceplate lathe—capable of 100"-diameter work—into your basement shop before turning your next bowl.

If you remember life before personal computers and VCRs, perhaps you even turned at an Oliver lathe in your high school shop. The familiar Oliver logo was once the dominant player in millwork shops, trade schools, and industrial technology shops across the U.S.

So reliable were its products that it was said that the biggest problem the Oliver sales force faced was selling a second Oliver machine: Oliver tools just kept running. In fact, George Paes, an Oliver district salesman and AAW member, remembers a light-hearted offer: a bonus awaited him if he could find a paint that would dissolve an Oliver machine after 20 years of service.

Consider these industry-leading features from Oliver:

• Gargantuan lathes weighing up to a rock-steady 5 tons (Model 22AC)
• A telescoping bed lathe (Model 26AC) that slid from 8½ feet between centers when closed, and opened up to 16 feet
• An 8" portable lathe, a forerunner to today’s popular small lathes
• Premium Timken tapered roller bearings
• In 1904, introduction of an electronic four-speed lathe
• Mechanical variable speed changes with pulley diameters (introduced before 1920)
• Infinitely variable AC system that allowed any speed between 600 and 3600 rpm, available in the 1920s

Midwest roots

Oliver Company had a storied history in Grand Rapids, MI. Its roots go back to 1890 when Joe Oliver started making miter trimmers under the American Machinery Co. name. In 1903, the name was changed to “Oliver” to avoid confusion with the American Wood Working Machinery Co. of Rochester, NY.

In its heyday, Oliver produced diverse products including electric glue pots, planer/jointer knives and safety heads (to replace the square heads that were the norm), shapers, tablesaws, jointers, tenoners, mortisers, sanders, jig saws, grinders, handscrew clamps, and vises. The Oliver catalog listed metal lathes, metal spinning lathes, and of course, wood lathes of all types.

By 1994, the company estimated it had produced over 150,000 machines, with at least half that number still in use on a weekly basis. At one time Oliver had branch offices in New York City, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Phoenix. Overseas offices included Manchester, England, and Paris, France.

This company and its products were not just aimed at standard or low-tech operations. It once designed and built a computer-controlled wood lathe to turn large patterns for missile nose cones. Oliver even designed and delivered a specialty bandsaw to cut the unique tiles for the Space Shuttle program.

Lathes of every size imaginable were a story unto themselves. I have found no company anywhere in the world that made such a diverse range of lathes, from their small “Junior Lathe” to enormous faceplate lathes and the beast shown above.

Pattern and millwork shops and especially public and trade schools were commonly outfitted with Oliver lathes—known for their ruggedness, heft, and reliability. Innovations included direct power drive lathes (the headstock spindle is the armature for the motor), electronic variable speed systems, and motor or spindle brakes to reduce the time to stop the machine. Oliver also pioneered quick-action tailstocks, chucks to hold square material, and an improved system for locking tool rest bases.

And today? The company we revered ended in 1999 when an individual purchased the Oliver name. You may see woodworking machinery (tablesaws, shapers, jointer, sanders, but no lathes yet) made in the Orient under the Oliver logo. However, these Asian machines aren’t original Oliver designs at this time.

A former employee, Richard Fink, purchased all Oliver drawings, patterns, documents, machine inventory, and many parts to service the Oliver equipment still in service. Under the Eagle brand name, Richard now manufactures two original Oliver machines—the 24" planer and the famous Straitoplaner.

References: Vintage Woodworking Machinery by Dana Batory. Special thanks to Richard Fink of Eagle Machinery and Repair (Oliver Machinery employee from 1976 until 1999 and the source for Oliver parts and service), and to George Paes of Nipomo, CA, a former Oliver employee district salesman, for their assistance in researching this article.