What I Wish I Knew Before I Started Woodturning: The Ugly

Now, it's still my favorite creative outlet knowing all of these now, don't get me wrong. But if you're considering woodturning for yourself... you might be in the research spiral right now. Let me give my thoughts, since it's kind of like testing someone out on a date. It's WAY better to figure out some deal-breaker before you've given your heart away, no?

In the interest of fairness I'm going to list both the pleasant and not-so-pleasant surprises I've found, with the latter coming in the next post.

Without further ado!

Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Woodturning

How little you actually turn in a given project.

This is more pen-specific. Actually cutting into the wood takes the least amount of time compared to the entire process. You spend most of your time sanding (ugh!), gluing, waiting for the glue to dry, drilling, assembling, cleaning... I'd estimate a 25% turning, 75% "other" situation. I can't imagine how much those percentages skew if you're (more of) a blogger, or an woodturning influencer.

It's not (entirely) cheap.

My criteria for a hobby research spiral tends to look something like, "how do I do this with quality products for as little money as possible?" As a professed lover of second-hand goods, wood-turning was a difficult hobby for me to justify paying around $1000 merely to get started. The lathe is undoubtedly the biggest expense, and certain sizes (such as the mini I have) simply don't come up that often in the used market. When you factor in all your other necessities - like dust collection, consumables like sandpaper, let alone the wood itself - you're looking at a chunk of change that many people simply don't want to take a chance with. Thankfully, there are many (many!) ways of cutting costs down, especially if you like to MacGuyver or jerry-rig solutions, shop-style. :)

Making your own tools drives costs down.

My advice here - especially to the dilettantes that amass many hobbies which fall by the wayside because their interest wanes - is to check the feeling you get when you think about woodturning. It's a different kind of magnetism compared to other endeavors which don't have staying power. Apologies for the lack of words I can use to describe that feeling. It's just... different.

It requires more dedicated space than you'd think.

A lathe is like a table saw in that it needs space all the way around it, ideally, though you could get away with tucking it in to a corner as I have. But yeah, you'll need room for all the little collection of things you need for the craft. Wood storage alone is a space hog. If you stay within turning smaller spindles like pens or other ornaments it isn't too bad, but branching out into bowls, vases, platters... wow. The temptation to hoard is real.

It's LOUD.

This is due to the dust collection set-up I have now, as a running lathe is nearly silent (and when it's not, turn it off so you can figure out why!). My system is a shop-vac connected to a handmade swivel mount; the hose intake rests pretty much right up against whatever spindle I'm working on. The entire system is powered on and off by a foot switch. It's basically a necessity that I wear earplugs or earbuds during the duration of a turn/subsequent sanding as those vacuums really are obnoxious. One of my partners' office is near my shop, so I have to be judicious about the times when I can craft as a result.

Lathe-mounted intake hose contraption.

The physical demands.

Surprisingly, there's a fair amount of physical demand in woodturning! You'd watch videos and be led to think that standing still at a lathe wouldn't be that bad, even accounting for your arms being up holding your tools on the rest. Not so. For long sessions, or if you start doing projects "production-style" (that is, finishing all of the gluing of all your batch in one step, then turning all of your batch at once, and so forth), you can start to get pains in muscles of the body you didn't know you were straining. Poor posture does contribute unless you're constantly aware of your body mechanics - how you stand at the lathe, how you present your tool to the piece, where your feet are in relation to the bench. That's its own mental load too.

Yikes, the learning curve.

It's steep. I remember the first time I ever turned a pen - it was a class at Rockler in Los Angeles. We were to make three pens during the class, and while the first two woods I chose came out well, the third one pretty much disintegrated on the lathe. Granted, black palm has the kind of grain pattern that's challenging for total beginners; I can still remember the wood shrapnel getting sent out all over the store from my angle of entry error. It makes my heart race now just thinking about how unexpected it all was! Turning does have a somewhat unforgiving ramp up, and if you use high-speed-steel tools rather than carbide-tipped ones, you're looking at needing to learn the mechanics of sharpening in addition to turning. The best thing here to get comfortable with the mechanics of a lathe is to head to Lowe's or your big-box home improvement store, buy a bunch of pine 1x1s or rip-down a 2x4 into 2x2s, and turn away. Pine is soft, yielding, and most of all cheap. Best you fuck up there instead of on that expensive burl you've been saving. Ask me how I know. :)

The sustainability of the stock you use starts to consume your thoughts.

Best to give an example here. What's pictured above is a rosewood, which refers to any of a number of richly-hued, slow-growing timbers highly-prized for their color and durability. Bois de rose, in particular, is a type of rosewood that is native to the island of Madagascar.

Bois de rose, or Dalbergia maritima, was heavily exploited during the 19th century for furniture making. Since it was known for its special fragrance, it was also used especially in producing essential oils. Similarly, other types of rosewood species globally have experienced progressive decline due to heavy logging, habitat conversion, and unsustainable harvesting practices. The excessive demand for rosewoods in high-end furniture (especially in China, where it's referred to as "hongmu" and indicates wealth/status) and musical instrument production also resulted in illegal logging activities, which further exacerbated the problem.

As a result, many of type of rosewoods, including Bois de rose, are now listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Appendices, indicating that they are endangered and that their trade is regulated. Even their movement is closely watched. Those turners that got their hands on Bois de rose or other rosewoods before their entry into CITES cannot sell it outside of their country, or import it. There are a number of horror stories you'll find online where a person has their instrument confiscated for being made of rosewood as they attempt to enter another country, though I've not personally known anyone in this situation.

Woodturning is a hobby of stories, and people want to know where the wood you're using came from, and what it has to say. With the large focus on sustainability in all sectors, I think we're reaching a time where we can't in good conscience pretend like our effect on the world is minimal anymore.

The community.

This heading is actually a little misleading. The community is wonderful. It's tight-knit, generous with their insights, and on average maintains a very high standard of skill. What's I'm referring to here is the homogeneity. This is a hobby generally dominated by older, retired, Caucasian males, which is not a bad thing in and of itself even if the demographics are rapidly changing. What's distressing is because of the nature of the advanced age, you get close to many mentors ("pen grandpas") who get sick and die, sometimes out of nowhere. It's a heart-wrenching thing to realize some fixture in the community, maybe someone you've traded blanks with or asked advice from, is no longer there. Like a continual getting the rug pulled out from underneath you sort of feeling. Of course, this demerit probably speaks more to one's relationship with death rather than a critique of woodturning itself, but the fact remains that I deeply wish someone prepared me for this depressing reality of the hobby.