Efficient Lathe Tool Setup - Lean Woodworking

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Lathe Tool Setup - Having a good solid lathe setup and organization will make your wood turning more efficient and much more enjoyable. When we wood turn, we use various turning tools such as, chucks, accessories, and calipers. All these items should be organized in a manner that is efficient and clean. They should be easy to access, but out of the way of your turning process. Ideally, you shouldn't have to move any tools to get to another. We have set up our wood lathe in a manner that is both pleasing to the eye, and easy to find the tools and accessories we need.

Location

Our location for the lathe is a little less traditional. It is in the right front corner of the shop that is the most utilized. Right next to the bench where you would typically try to get a tool chest or another storage item that's used daily. We don't turn often, so this location is a little strange but we have a good reason! We put a floor sweep in the corner to help maintain a nice clean floor. We are able to quickly clean up hand plane shavings, everyday dust, small wood chunks, and now with the lathe right next door, all the lathe shavings.

Turning on the lathe produces an incredible amount of shavings that need to be dealt with. Having a floor sweep right next door is incredibly handy. Switch on the dust collection, grab a broom, open the blast gate and bam! You have everything cleaned up in under a minute. Some would argue a dust pan and broom would be just as easy (little bit longer) but you don't have to empty the dust collector's bin as often.

Turning Tool Storage

Whether it is turning a bowl, a pen, or even a spindle, odds are we'll be using many different shapes, sizes, and styles of turning tools throughout the project. It is vital that we organize these tools and place them within a comfortable arm's reach. There are many different ways to organize turning tools but we have decided to go with a combination for a few specific reasons. Magnetic strips and the traditional leaned back tools.

Magnetic Strips

For all our traditional tools, we decided to use magnetic strips that can be found at your local hardware store or sourced online. Our traditional wood turning tools are made from HSS or High Speed Steel. This is perfect material for the magnetic base because it is magnetic! There were a few concerns when ironing out the details for positioning and how many magnetic strips to use. We originally tried to only use one strip but that did not leave enough surface area for the magnets to get a firm grab on the tools. The scrapers and skew chisels had plenty of contact with the strip but the curved portions of the bowl and spindle gouges wouldn't hold. So, the easy fix was to add additional magnetic strips. We ended up using three. This worked very well for all the tools but one. The largest bowl gouge we had was just too heavy. We then added a little support under it, which worked very well.

Traditional leaned back storage

For our carbide insert wood-turning tools, we decided to use the traditional leaned back tools storage. Our main reasoning for this was that the shafts of the tools were not steel, and therefore not magnetic. Our second reason was to experiment on what we liked better. After all, this isn't set in stone! Our leaned back storage was very simple to construct and put together. We first measured how much angle we wanted the tool to sit at, and then measured the corresponding depth that the main shelf needed to be. Then we added some sides to the shelf to keep the butt end of the tools from sliding around. With the bottoms in place, we needed to keep the shafts of the tools upright and separated. We used a large forsner bit at the drill press to make some half circle cutouts in a piece of scrap MDF. This worked great!