Joe Wagner: Kitchen Spatulas

Joe Wagner is a life-long woodturner who has invented a number of special tools and often makes tools for his own use. He has turned a number of wooden kitchen spatulas to give as gifts to family and friends. He introduced this demonstation as a rather quick project that can be fun for the turner and useful to the recipients.

Preparing the Blanks

Joe saws multiple blanks from a nominal 1" thick plank of any desirable wood that is not too brittle. In this demonstration he used soft maple. He provided patterns for two shapes, one with a straight-edged blade and one with a curved-edge blade. Both patterns were nominally 2¾" × 10" × 1" in dimension. By laying out the patterns side by side on the plank in alternating directions so the narrow handle portion of one borders the wider blade portion of the neighbor you can use the plank very efficiently with little cut-off waste. Carefully mark centers on both ends of the blank.

Turning the Spatula

A blank is mounted between centers using a Steb-type drive and a blunted cone center (to prevent deep penetration). Joe has made his own blunted cone-center insert to use with a replaceable-tip live center unit. He starts with mild steel bar stock and turns the bar to the desired profile using either high-speed steel turning tools or machinist’s tool steel bits. An alternative is to simply mount a small washer on the tip of a conventional cone center to limit the penetration depth of the point. Joe finds that alternative a bit frustrating because the washers are so often dropped and lost in shavings. The blank was mounted with the drive at the blade end of the blank and the cone center at the handle end.

Joe used a roughing gouge to turn the handle portion of the blank to round. He uses a round-bar roughing gouge rather than the conventionally forged roughing gouge. The round-bar gouge is formed from a round bar stock with a U-shaped flute milled in much like a bowl gouge. He used the same gouge to make very light rounding cuts on the edge of the blade portion of the blank. Light cuts are important in this area to avoid splitting off the edges.

Measure back 7 inches from the tip of the blade and mark the handle at that position for the center of the decorative details to be turned into the handle. Use a fluteless gouge to turn beads or other decorative elements centered on that mark. Joe uses a simple tool ground from ¼" x 8" tool-bit bar stock purchased from Enco. The tip of the tool has been ground flat on the top with a fingernail profile on the end. He chose to turn a single bead centered on the detail mark with half beads bordering on each side. He then turned the handle sections on each side of the detail to the desired shape.

In this demo he rolled from the half beads into a cove cut and flared the handle to about ½" minimum diameter both above and below the bead detail. He used the roughing gouge for much of the handle shaping because it was faster than the small fluteless gouge. He used a skew to refine the rounding off of the blade edges and to round off the end of the handle. A skew could also be used to refine the details of the decorative element and the handle, but Joe chose to simply sand these sections down to 320 grit. He then moistened the wood lightly with a damp paper towel to raise the grain. A fine burning wire was used to darken the bottom grooves between the bead and the bordering half beads. That is easier than worrying about the cleanness of the grooves and adds a decorative feature.

The handle was then sanded with 400 grit paper and Beartex to remove the raised grain. The end of the handle was then parted down with a skew to about a 1/16" diameter stub. Be careful not to part all the way through between centers, or binding could result in a violent ejection of the piece from the lathe.

The piece was then removed from the lathe and the small stub was sanded off the end of the handle. Joe prefers to do this with the sandpaper held on his thigh while working the end of the handle across the paper.

Thinning the Spatula Blade

Up to this point the blade of the spatula had been left at full thickness of the 1" blank. Joe uses a bandsaw to slice off the faces of the blade to taper the blade of the spatula to a thin tip. He has developed a couple of clever jigs to facilitate this cut. One will create a flat taper and the other a concave taper.

The flat-taper jig is a sled jig that slides across the table of the band saw with a guide strip in the miter slot. The spatula is mounted on the jig so the blade of the spatula is vertical. The rounded handle is held in two brackets with U-shaped notches in the side so the handle is parallel with the saw table but angled to the miter slot to create the desired taper. The back side of the spatula blade is supported by a vertical dowel when cutting the slice from the first face of the blade. To make the cut for the second face, the spatula is rotated 180 degrees and a bushing is placed over the dowel to compensate for the thickness of the missing slice.

The concave-taper jig functions in much the same way but with the added complication of curvature. In this case the jig consists of two major parts. The first is a false table surface that mounts on the bandsaw table with a guide strip on the bottom engaged in the miter slot. This piece is fixed to the saw table and does not move during the cuts. The upper surface of the false table has two curved grooves routed into it. The radii of those grooves are carefully chosen to provide the concave cut being sought. The second part of the jig is the sled portion. On its bottom side are two dowels that ride in the grooves of the false table as the sled is advanced into the saw blade providing the curved movement past the blade. The upper side of the sled is mounted with similar bracket and dowel supports for the spatula that were described in the flat-taper jig description.

Finishing

Once the two slices have been removed on the bandsaw to create the tapered spatula blade, the blade faces can be sanded on a belt sander and the tip on a disk sander to remove the drive marks and shape the tip as desired. Joe used a sanding block to hand sand the blade with finer grits (180 and 220). Joe has glued the two grits to opposite sides of an MDF sanding block for convenience.

Joe uses Mahoney walnut oil finish on his spatulas. It can be brushed on or dipped. After allowing a bit of penetration you should wipe the piece dry with paper towel. Walnut oil will harden over time and is favored over mineral oil. A final rubbing with Mahoney walnut oil wax and buffing with a soft cloth finishes the project.

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Demo illustrations...