Winding sticks

After working for years without proper winding sticks, I finally broke down and built a set.  I had some padauk boards that I picked through to find one with some quartersawn grain that I could rip from one edge.  I also had some holly left over from the winding sticks I made for my niece a few years ago.

I more or less followed Paul Sellers design and build.  They are somewhat triangular in cross section with a holly button at the bottom center of each and holly inlays on the top edge of one.  The other one has a strip of walnut rabbeted along the top edge for contrast with the holly.  I wanted to use ebony but didn't have a piece long enough.  In hindsight, I wish I would have tried to ebonize the walnut since it isn't that much darker than the padauk.

I made these 18 inches long but I think 15 or 16 would have been better.  I used a 1:7 dovetail marker to layout the holly inlays and chopped out the waste with a chisel.

I glued everything in place with liquid hide glue.

Here they are in the white, looking good.

I finished them by wiping on a few coats of sealcoat shellac.  That turned out to be a mistake.  I had purposely avoided sanded these so I wouldn't contaminate the holly with dust from the darker padauk.  I wasn't able to get a good surface with a smoothing plane since there seemed to be reversing grain, so I used a card scraper to finish up.  Even though the scraper was making shavings it still left some dust which I failed to clean off well enough before shellac.  Long story longer, I ended up with pink holly and had to scrape the finish off of the inlays to try and remove it.  I got most of it but you can still see signs of it, especially in those end grain plugs.

They turned out OK but it chaps my backside that I was capable of better work and failed to produce it.

Lessons learned for the next set, I will make them shorter, ebonize the walnut, spray the shellac, and no scraping or sanding, handplanes all the way tear-out be damned.