Adding Antler Accents

I'm really excited about this little turning project I've got going. It's made out of ash more specifically a piece of ash crotch. Look at the beautiful grain. It's a little lidded box. So what I'll do eventually is I'll part the lid off the top, hollow the base. That's gonna sit on there. This just screams for an accent that will go up here. On the top of the box, a little button just to help pop the top just a little bit. I'm gonna do that with a chunk of antler. So we got to cover a bunch of things here. One is working with the antler here on the lathe to turn it. So it works with the turning I have here. Also the adhesive that we need. We've got this dissimilar stuff going here. We've got antler, we've got ash. So we wanna make sure that we're using the correct glue in order to bind those parts together. And you'll see, I'm actually gonna turn the antler after it's put in there. So it's gotta be a good, strong bond. So everything stays together through the turning process. First step of the operation, I'm gonna cut this tine off. That's the one I'm gonna use for this project. Then we'll come back and start on the lathe. Getting this component turned. I've got the tine in a 4 jaw chuck here. And what I wanna do initially is just a little bit of rounding here at the bottom. It's a little bit eccentric cause it's got some high spots. One of the things you wanna do with this is make sure you're using high-speed steel cutters. Antler is hard stuff. So a tool steel isn't gonna hold up real well against it. Just gentle approaches here. As I work on getting it a little bit rounder. The goal is to put a tenant on the bottom of this piece that fits into the hole that you saw in the top of the box. Then we'll glue those components together and we'll actually finish this turning right on the top of the box. We're a little less eccentric, closer to the round. Antler is a pretty cool product to turn. It doesn't have any grain but you do have to watch the core of it. I'll show you here. Sometimes in the very center it's a little bit spongy, and you gotta be careful about that just cause it gets soft but this is a great piece. It's nice and solid all the way through. All right, we're ready for sizing. So now what I'm gonna do is just go to a parting tool. And like I said, we'll produce a tenant on the end here that fits into the hole we've got in the box. Caught an edge, went a little eccentric there. And it is one of the unique things about working with this weird stuff that can happen cause, the shape of the antler is hard to get a perfect grab on it with the 4 jaw chuck. I think we're a little big still, which is good. All right, let's see where we're at now. A real accurate way to check this is with calipers. So I can put this side inside the hole. That was the inside part of the calipers. With this side on my tenant, we're really close. Just got a skin a little bit off of there. We are pretty close, close enough that I wanna bring the box itself over. The very end of the tenant's going right in the hole. So I'm gonna skin just a little bit more there. Now, the other thing I wanna point out is that whether I'm working with antler or something else when I make a button like this, what I wanna do is undercut this shoulder just a little bit to make sure that it makes good contact with the top of the box. So I'd rather, this part is concave than convex. So I'm gonna take care of that. Just a little bit more off the tenant. That's probably about enough.\ Let's see what we've got. If you do under cut it just a tiny bit. You're still gonna be okay. Cause we're gonna use a medium viscosity glue to put it in and that'll give you a little bit of gap filling capability. All right, hear that? That's the sound of a nice fit, all right. So the antler can come out. Now what I'm gonna do just to kind of create an easy way to hold everything together, is get the box itself back on the lathe. Protect the bed of the lathe from any glue drips. Like I said, we've got dissimilar surfaces here. So we're gonna use CA cyanoacrylate glue. It's gonna do a great job of holding them together. It is a little bit gap filling. If we get just a little bit a squeeze out, running down the lid, that doesn't bother me. because we're gonna turn all of this together again. After the antler is place. That takes care of that, now we'll give that just a little bit of time to dry. And then we can come back and wrap up that accident here on top of the box. Well, the glue is dry. I took that long and off here. I cut that off. Now I'm just working on my shaping. And now beauty's in the eye of the beholder. It's just a matter of applying a shape to this that you like. Kind of amazing, you know we're doing all this turning on that antler with just the bod between that small tenant and the top of the box, holding everything in place. Let's see what we have so far. That's pretty cool. I'm gonna keep working on that. It's a little oversize right now. It's bigger than I want it to be gonna end up with just a bit of a button on there that it can grab on to take the lid off the box. So an antler accent like this is a pretty cool addition to the lid of a box. Great thing that you can add to boxes and whether it's antler or some other non conventional material CA glue does a great job of holding it in place so that we can finish turning it.