Lathe
Also called: wood lathe, turning lathe
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A lathe is a machine that holds a piece of wood and spins it steadily on its own axis while a cutting tool, held and guided by the turner, pares it down into a round shape. This way of working wood is called turning; Jones (1920) defined it precisely as "the production of circular shapes by revolving the wood in a lathe and operating on it with suitable cutting tools."
How the work is held
The wood is usually gripped between two centres, points that bite into each end of the workpiece and let it spin freely. Nicholson (1832) described a typical lathe of this kind as having two puppets, the upright blocks that carry the centres: the right-hand puppet can be wound in or out on a screw to fit work of different lengths, while the left is generally fixed in place, with the workpiece supported and turning between the two. Moxon (1677), writing well over a century earlier, noted that turners kept two or three matched pairs of puppets for a single lathe and chose the shortest pair that would suit the job, because a taller setup left the work sitting too high above the pitch, meaning the comfortable working height for that particular turner. For the same reason, he wrote, the height of a lathe's legs had to be judged against both the work in hand and the stature of the workman standing at it. A tool rest sits alongside the spinning work to steady the cutting tool: Jones (1920) described a rest whose base could be set to any angle along the lathe's bed, the rail its fittings run along, and slid in or out to suit the width of the piece being turned. For flat, disc shaped work mounted on a faceplate, a plate fixed to the wood in place of the centres, Jones noted that the top of the rest needed to sit level with, or just below, the height of the lathe's centres while the face of the work was being cut.
Kinds of lathe
Nicholson (1832) listed several kinds in use in his day: the pole lathe, sprung by a bent pole overhead and worked by a treadle; the foot lathe, driven by treadle alone; and the wheel lathe, used for very large work and turned by hand strength at a large wheel. By 1832, he noted, the pole lathe was already little used. Later machines folded turning into a single combination unit: Hayward (1950) described machines that carried a lathe as one of several attachments alongside a circular saw, router, drilling head, jigsaw and disc sander, and grouped the main types of woodworking machine into the all-purpose universal machine, the basic lathe fitted with attachments, and the radial arm saw.
What a lathe is used for
Audels (1923) called the lathe one of the most widely used woodworking machines, put to work in pattern making, furniture, carriage building and any job needing wood shaped into a cylindrical, tube-like form. Small decorative turned discs, called pateras, were cited by Fairham (1920) as examples of fine lathe work suited to light, delicate pieces. Holtzapffel (1846) separated chucks, the fittings that grip the workpiece against the spinning drive, into two classes: those used simply to fix work in the lathe, and those used for ornamental turning, a more elaborate decorative style of the craft. In green woodworking, where parts are turned from unseasoned timber, Alexander (1978) explained that a chair rung needs wood with a very straight run of grain, mounted so its centre lines up exactly with the lathe's own centre, because work that runs off centre cuts through the long fibres and leaves the finished rung weaker; he also described cutting the rung's round tenon, the turned peg at its end that fits into a socket, using a tenon gauge fitted onto a cutoff chisel and working at slow lathe speed.
A safety note
Audels (1923) warned that glued-up work, pieces already joined with glue before being mounted, should not be run at high speed, because centrifugal force can throw it off the lathe.