Burnt Wood Finishing on the Lathe

Ive been working quite a bit with green wood recently so I have a nice stack of split wood ready to be worked.  A friend of mine is letting me use his lathe.  I have really been struggling to learn to use the machine, but I did finally turn out a stretcher.  My brother had the idea to do a burnt wood finish.  We burnt the wood and then finished it off with a coat of linseed oil.  I am pleased with the results, and I will be exploring these techniques more in the future.  

As I mention in the video the wood is from a friend of mine who live in the next town over from me.  I cut a few hackberry trees off of her lot.  It was quite a lot of wood so I made and sold a few bar stools with this and then I split the rest and painted the ends.  

I have been working mostly with a shave horse and a drawknife to shape the wood but a woodworker friend of mine suggested to me that I learn to turn.  It just happened that a friend of mine had a lathe sitting around that he is willing to let me borrow and use indefinitely.

Learning to turn is challanging.  In the begging I had a few pieces of wood flying through the air very near to my face.  When I say a piece of wood I pretty much mean a small pecan log.  No harm done.  One major advancement was aquiring a set of roughing gouges.  These are large chisels in the shape of a U with a long sturdy handel.  Without this any work on the lathe is not possible. 

This last weekend my brother, my father, and I decided to give turning a try with the right tool for the job.  I mounted the piece of pecan that had formly been flying through the air and roughed it from an oval like cylender to an actual round piece of wood.  I had just broken the cheap handle for my other roughing gouge so we decided to turn this piece into a handel.

Then my dad wanted to mount a piece that I had split out of the hackberry tree, and so using a centerfinder I marked the centers and mounted the piece.  My brother came and roughed nearly to a cylender, and then I took it down the rest of the way.  Then because of my interest in making chairs I decided to make a chair stretcher.  So I took the piece way down and gave it a nice curve.

At this point my brother wanted to do a burnt wood finish.  I got out a torch, we lit it, and burnt the stretcher while turning on the lathe.  This type of finish worked especially well.  I would not have thought to do this if it was not for my brother.  I will use this technique in the future on full pieces of furniture.