Craig’s list lathe

Somehow I neglected to mention that last Thursday night I bought a lathe. It had been listed on Craig’s List. Arlene spotted it the previous weekend from Maine and called it to my attention. It was in Watertown, just one town away from Newton, and was listed at only $60. I finally got around to calling on Thursday, left a message around 8:45, and got a call back an hour later. I said I thought it might be too late to come over, but the seller said they would be up late and weren’t home anyway, that I could probably get there about as soon as they did.

It was in East Watertown, not far from where we had lived thirty years ago. It took me a while to get my act together and get over there. It turned out to be even less far from where we had lived than I thought; it was on a street that we used to walk down often on our way to shopping at all the Armenian bakeries and grocery stores in East Watertown.

I rang the doorbell and the guy who answered said, “You look familiar.” His last name had been on the answering machine message and I wondered at that time if it was Matt’s friend of the same name, so I said, “Friend of Matt Pickett, in fact, his father-in-law.” The seller had been at Anne’s wedding!

The lathe is really a mini-lathe, with a maximum capacity of about a four inch diameter turning. That’s enough to get started and see if I like woodturning enough to do it. If so, I can get a bigger lathe later. If not, it only cost me $45 to find out, not a couple of hundred dollars. My father had a lathe when I was a kid, but I only used it a couple of times. Right now I can see using one to make lots of fiber-handling gizmos, noestepindes, spindles, niddy-noddies, but I think my first big project with it may be a swift. I made a bare minimum swift years ago. It’s pretty ugly and doesn’t really handle a two-yard-per-turn skein. Being able to turn a decent hub for a swift will be a good start. I ordered a set of turning tools, probably pretty low quality, from eBay yesterday. This is another “stay tuned”, or in this case, “stay turned”, situation.