How to Make a Wooden Spatula

Here's a cool project that you can use in your kitchen. It's a wooden spatula for pushing stuff around in a fry pan, all made out of hard maple. It's a combination of lathe work, bandsaw work, some simple sanding. I'd say this is a high beginner low intermediate level project. Let's jump right in. For the blank for your material, it should be hard maple. Best choice for this. About four inches wide, 14 inches long. Take a piece that's been planed to the same thickness. And we're going to use that to establish our handle. And cut yourself some slack on this. This is a fun project, not an engineering project. So dimensionally don't take it too seriously. Gonna trace this piece end to end, end to end. And what that does is it gives us a width that's exactly the same as the thickness. Four inches up from the end of the spatula, square across. And then use a fancy schmancy radius gauge like this role of masking tape. And then this end strike those lines down, this being the spatula. End of the deal, not the handle end. And what we'll do when we get to the lathe, corner to corner, corner to corner, that will find a center in that end. Cut this shape out. On the bandsaw head for the lathe. Release cuts on the headstock end so they can go on the spur center. Center on this end so it can go on the tailstock center. We're not going to mess with the spatula end of this. We're making the handle. That's what we're doing at this step. So here's what's going to happen. I'm going to turn it round, I'm going to shape it, I'm going to get it to the shape of my dreams. So about three quarter by three quarter right now. A good comfortable handle size for this is somewhere between half inch and five-eighths inch in diameter. This and this is not lathe work, we're going to take care of that later. I like it. Next step, bandsaw. Here's your bandsaw layout and the business end of this, leave about an eighth of an inch. Then here, strike a line from that eighth inch point to the top corner. Next cut, you want to take the end of this at an angle about 10 degrees or so. I'm going to cut that angle and take the excess off the end here. Next step is the S word. We're gonna sand, sand, sand. Now, we're thinner here than here. So take care of that in the sanding step by furthering this down until the thickness across the bottom of your spatula is the same throughout. Sand these curves on a drum sander, spindle sander, and take care of this little hand sanding will fix that right up. And then we'll look at finishing. Combination of power tools and hand sanding, you can sand this out pretty fast. One of the things I realized as I started sanding is that in addition to this angle, it looked nice if we had an angle going this way. So I've tapered the end of the spatula in just a little bit. I brought the tip down so it's pretty uniform and thickness all the way across. And now with hand sanding, I'm just furthering everything together. I'm really happy with how that looks. Seal that up. With a food, say finish. Mineral oil is a great choice. So my advice is when you're making this for yourself, cut yourself some slack. This doesn't need to be super formulaic. They don't need to all be identical. In fact, it's kind of cool when they're not all identical. It's a fun project. Treat it like a fun project and be creative. You'll be using the spatula to push stuff around in a frying pan in no time at all.