George Vondriska

How to Turn an Offset Foot

George Vondriska
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    Description

    Tired of the traditional straight legs on your tables and chairs? Try master woodworker George Vondriska’s method for turning an offset foot on the lathe which adds lots of interest to any woodworking project. A WoodWorkers Guild of America (WWGOA) original video.

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    Let me show you how you can put a really interesting looking foot on the bottom of a leg. What I've done here so far is on this table leg, left the top end square, got the bottom and just roughed out. It's just barely round. I've created an offset point on the tail stack end, off center. So now what I'm gonna do is go to that new offset point, lock that in place, my tool rest is positioned so that even at the offset, it's not gonna touch.

    I've got plenty of clearance. Now, when I come in and start cutting, my foot is gonna end up down here. So I'm gonna start cutting to my left, upstream from where I want the top of that foot to be. As I continue to make my cuts here, what I'll end up with is a leg that tapers down to this point, leaving the offset foot projecting out that way. So now I can move my tool rest up, keep paring away this material, working my way down toward the foot I've got on the bottom.

    Now, in order to finish this off, what you'll need to do is come back to your original center, and then come back to the top of the leg here and turn down to a transition point with this, where we started taking advantage of the offset. So for a little bit of your turning here, you have to toggle back and forth between the offset position and the center position in order to get these two to feather together. Then do that same thing with sandpaper, you'll have all your curves flowing together and a very interesting looking leg with an offset foot.

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