Cyanoacrylate Adhesive (CA) Wood Turning Application

I have a couple of favorite projects that I really like to do on the lathe. One of them are these small goblets like this. Another are lidded boxes like this one, the lid comes off. You can put all sorts of little special stuff inside there. What these two projects have in common is that they have to be mounted on the lathe, such that I can turn the end of these unsupported. So what we need is a way to get these mounted on the lathe. That's gonna grip them securely so that I can work on this end. Now there's lathe chucks out there. That'll grab your material and do that for ya. They are kind of expensive. So let me show you an alternative way that you can get your material mounted onto a face plate like this. The alternative method is to use cyanoacrylate glue. Now cyanoacrylate is way too hard a word to say. So we just call this CA glue. CA glue is incredible stuff. Very, very strong lots of applications in the shop. In this case, what it's gonna allow us to do is take a turning blank, apply glue to the end grain of it, glue it to this face plate, and virtually instantaneously start working on this piece without this end being supported. It's incredible stuff that this glue can do. The first thing we wanna do is be able to fairly accurately center this on the face plate. So I'm gonna turn on the lathe and using the tool rest and a pencil. I'm gonna get a series of circles on here to create a bullseye so that it's gonna help me center this. Now what I've got are a series of concentric rings. And what I can use those for is to locate my square blank. Just lining it up with the rings as I go. So that this is pretty close to centered on here. That way I don't waste a lot of wood when I start my turning. In the CA glue there are different viscosities that you can choose from. This one here is the thickest one I've got. And then from there, it goes down to one that's quite thin, pretty watery. In an application like this. What I'm concerned with is that if I use the real watery glue, it's gonna soak into the end, grain too fast and it's not gonna give me a real good bond. So I'm actually gonna use the thicker one. The watery glue is very useful to have around if you have a crack that you need to seep the glue into, the watery stuff will flow right down in there and do a repair like that for you. But here we wanna use the thick stuff. Now what I'll be doing is applying an activator to the board itself here, to the face plate, and then I'll be using the glue on the end grain. The activator accelerates the drying time, so that in just seconds, we're gonna be able to work with this material. So just a couple of spritzes of activator on here. Now, glue this end. I wanna show you though that on this end of the blank, I have marked the center out, and as I bring everything together I'll be putting the tailstock into this center point so that when I bring this all together it just helps keep everything aligned so that my blank is nicely centered on the lathe. So make sure the tailstock is free and ready to slide. So I'll get glue here on the end grain. Center that on the tail stock, bring this end up against my bulls-eye.' Lock that in place. Now we just need to give that maybe oh, 20 seconds or so and we'll be able to work with this. In the time it's taken me to set up my tool rest, get my face shield on. I know that glue is ready to go. I'm gonna keep the tailstock in place for the rounding process. Cause that's the part where it's hardest on this thing to be unsupported. Once it's rounded, I'll be able to move the tail stock out of the way and I'll show you how you can work on this with no support at all on this end. I've got my spindle roughed out. It's completely round. Now the initial shaping here, I'm gonna keep the tailstock in place for that, that lets me work a little bit faster and not worry about chatter. Once that's done, we'll move the tail stock away. I'm gonna make a little spinning top here. So this is gonna be the pointy end down here. The handle for the top will be up here. That shape is nearly complete. All I need to do is give my top a little bit of a point down here and then finish the handle. So now we're ready to slide this away. And we can complete the turning unsupported by the tailstock. What's cool about this is that in completing this top, we've actually started the shape for one down here doing all that work without the tailstock being in place. When you start the next one, you can just work without your tailstock altogether. Cause the glue is doing such a great job of holding that on there. That glue is the tops for holding these parts together. Really no other glue would do it. It's very handy to have a variety of the viscosities available in your shop. If you're using the CA glue a lot. Larger bottles with bigger quantities are available. In fact, you can even get cocked guns full of the stuff. CA glue is very handy, not just for shop applications but all sorts of household repairs, ceramic mugs. Just about anything you need to fix you can probably stick it together with CA glue.