I’ve written before about the red cedar I obtained from a dining table that was about to be thrown out. Apart from the table top which has provided the source material for a number of platters, I had the legs which have proved ideal for a number of wood lathe projects.
Stainless Steel cutlery blanks are relatively cheap and available from a number of online sources – so I bought a variety of different blanks. These included different variants of cheese knives, herb cutter, bread knife, cake lifter, pizza cutter and bottle seals.
Then over several days I got busy on the lathe and made all sorts of handles. I did not have any particular design in mind, but basically just shaped them in ways that I thought looked good and which matched the size of the cutlery blank that would go with each one.
All the handles were given multiple coats of an oil based gloss varnish and the cutlery blanks were fitted. As the various cutlery blanks had several different ways of being fitted, I needed to adapt my fitting method. In most cases I started with a drilled hole to the depth of the tang then I made a simple saw out of a coping saw blade that I could work in the hole to create the slots that the tang fed into. When I finally inserted the tang, I also put a little bit of epoxy glue in the hole. For the bottle seals the fitting was a screw thread, so I used threaded timber insert nuts.
When I have the chance, I’m going to have a go at making a new knob for my coffee tamper and also a new handle for the group head for my coffee machine.