I am a lefty and I have started to recently understand things like bowl gouges to some limited degree.  For the record, my handedness doesn’t have anything to do with the understanding, but rather the application.  In previous turning endeavors, like spindles and handles, I am able to hold a gouge left hand on handle and right hand on tool rest.  This makes sense and is comfortable to me. 

Enter the bowl gouge and a push cut….  The positions required to have this hand configuration is a contortionistic impossibility.   Maybe I could have pulled it off when I was a young rubber person but that ship has sailed.  So it appears the only sane way to do this and be able to achieve any sort of bio-mechanical sanity is to reverse my hands, left hand on tool rest, right hand on handle and shift bodyweight into the cut while maintaining proper cutting angle.  

Is the solution to this just learn how to turn with either hand forward or is there a completely reverse lathe setup that lefties adopt?

 

6 hours ago, StaticLV2 said:

I am a lefty and I have started to recently understand things

 

Sure comrade...

I am not a turner, but hadn't seen your question posed before.  Interesting.  I did see a couple you tube videos on a quick search "left handed bowl turning" was the search term I put in.  Does your lathe run in reverse?  Could you turn the lathe around so the drive is on the right side instead of left?

To further complicate things, my lathe is a shopsmith so I don’t think it is reversible like a normal lathe.

Not that I would want to reverse a normal lathe either.  All of the accessories I have seen for those appear to be threaded against the normal direction of operation so a catch would, in one manner of speaking, unscrew everything which would in turn probably screw everything.

I'm a lefty and just learned to make do like many other things that arose along the way.  Running the lathe in reverse is your only choice if you want to turn left handed.  Most accessories that thread to a lathe spindle have locking screws to prevent them from removing themselves when used in reverse.

Edited June 2, 20242 yr by HandyDan

Move the lathe away from the wall and turn from the other side of the lathe. Works for hollowing without reversing the rotation.

 

 

Ok, that makes nothing but sense!!!

 

Thank you @lew

I think it is essential that turners know how to turn with either hand for outside work as it saves lots of time. Hollowing bowls is another story. Backside turning may be your best solution. We had a club member whose right hand was shriveled from birth and he was a great turner using backside.

Well ok then.  Standing on the opposite side works wonderfully.  That is so much easier!!!

Learning has occurred, thanks all!!

It would be best to learn to turn with both hands. I am right handed and not good doing much left handed. When I was fairly new to turning a lot of times I would turn left handed because it was to awkward sometimes right handed. Now I am very comfortable turning both ways.

I had rotator cuff repair surgery on my right should er some years ago and learned to do quite a few things left handed (I'm right handed). I find when turning I'm equally inept with either hand (but trying to do better).

Edited June 12, 20242 yr by Fred W. Hargis Jr

I actually do a lot of things right handed and have a fairly high level of ambidexterity so I will apply this to learning how to use either hand forward for turning.