Turn or grind?

It is relatively difficult to turn oak face-plate style. It tends to splinter, and you'll be hitting the endgrain twice in each revolution... four times with your plan of laminating the pieces perpendicular to each other. Oak is much easier to turn between centers, and this is the way it's used in furniture, etc.

If you want to turn the wheels, carefully cutting them out and sanding them to size on the lathe sounds like a plan. If you make a circle-cutting jig for your bandsaw and cut slowly, you can get very close to the finished size, minimizing the sanding.

You might also want to consider using a router to get your wheels true. A router with a long baseplate, pinned to the blank through the axle hole, would cut pretty close circle... but, of course, you'd have to contend with the changing grain directions as you worked around the circumference.

I'd personally go with the bandsaw/sanding...

> --But turning oak, well, my one or two attempts at turning scrap > pieces came out pretty dreadful so I'm curious to learn the do's now that > I > seem to have mastered the dont's, heh. If it's more or less an impossible > task I'm thinking I might get more uniform o.d.s by using a sanding disk > on > the rotating rough laminations. Any suggestions appreciated! >

>> --But turning oak, well, my one or two attempts at turning scrap >> pieces came out pretty dreadful so I'm curious to learn the do's now that >> I >> seem to have mastered the dont's, heh. Of course you turn oak faceplate-style, so far as the edges go, by cutting across the fibers, not into the grain. You can hurt yourself doing that kind of cut. Oak allows you to hog thick, finish thin the same as always. It's the same as turning a bead or parting off a piece in spindle orientation. Not that you need worry much about smooth if you're going to sweat iron rims on them. Facing can be done with a scraper, if you care to, but since you don't really need to be more than close enough to fit the tire, I'd just peel for perpendicular and close to thickness and let it go. Not as if the originals were finished, after all. If you're going to smooth 'em, close but over and block plane my choice.

If this isn't to be a turning project, rather a cannon project, I would jig sand it. Involves the same type of circle jig you use on your bandsaw, designed to slide up next to a disk or belt sander. Eyeball the cut, sand to round.

Warning, oak is less than pleasant when it starts to heat, so sand coarse!

Michael - you didn't mention the type of oak you plan to use, but your ease of turning the oak will be directly related to your skill of sharpening your bowl gouge. A 3/8th bowl gouge with a sharp fingernail grind will handle the endgrain just fine. Ride the bevel and don't hog it. I use a diamond hone to keep a sharp edge as soon as the gouge seems to run a bit rough. Good luck!

The gouge will be departing the new circumference at only one point of tangency, which means a jig is completely unnecessary. You simply find the sweet spot and follow it across the toolrest. I might add that it's a lot easier to use a broader profile gouge than a bowl gouge, because the broader profile will allow you to brace the gouge nearly perpendicular to the rest. Most bowl gouge advocates end up resting the gouge more or less beside the rest to get the same attack profile as the broader radius gouge gives with much better support. Not that you can't do it with a small radius gouge held the same as a broad radius, but your sweet spot is correspondingly smaller, and if the angle of the grind steepens as you depart the nose, as a lot of jigs are programmed to do, the steeper bevel angle, coupled with the cylindrical form of the gouge and the human versus mechanical support of the rest makes it more likely that you can begin end-grain pickup even to the point of a roll and catch.

Broad gouge with a bit too much nose, but a constant angle grind.

Bowl gouge used as most advocate. Were it not for the shorter wings and the support of the bright secondary area on the rest, it would be much more prone to dip and dig. Note that the broader gouge is skewed to the rear and rotated slightly into the cut to give a broader bevel reference and less ridging. Also examine the shavings in the first picture, which are thicker at the leading edge of the cut and feathered thin where the gouge exits the wood, a harbinger of a smoother surface.

Then there's the additional safety for the turner of being behind the tool, out of the throw zone with the push versus pull cut.

I'm not sure how turning oak got to be my project, or how I suddenly forgot how to sharpen a bowl gouge, but here is the original post from Ed Haas with my original answer... every bit if which I still agree with.

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It is relatively difficult to turn oak face-plate style. It tends to splinter, and you'll be hitting the endgrain twice in each revolution... four times with your plan of laminating the pieces perpendicular to each other. Oak is much easier to turn between centers, and this is the way it's used in furniture, etc.

If you want to turn the wheels, carefully cutting them out and sanding them to size on the lathe sounds like a plan. If you make a circle-cutting jig for your bandsaw and cut slowly, you can get very close to the finished size, minimizing the sanding.

You might also want to consider using a router to get your wheels true. A router with a long baseplate, pinned to the blank through the axle hole, would cut pretty close circle... but, of course, you'd have to contend with the changing grain directions as you worked around the circumference.

I'd personally go with the bandsaw/sanding...

> --But turning oak, well, my one or two attempts at turning scrap > pieces came out pretty dreadful so I'm curious to learn the do's now that > I > seem to have mastered the dont's, heh. If it's more or less an impossible > task I'm thinking I might get more uniform o.d.s by using a sanding disk > on > the rotating rough laminations. Any suggestions appreciated! >