To start off with, this is for a customer that wanted a darning egg to fix socks & things. Well she also wants to be able to hide her needles in the egg itself. So this is going to take a bit of ingenuity on my part and any ideas are welcome. I had thought about drilling a 1/2" hole about 2 to 3" deep in the wood to accommodate the needles and then use the handle as the plug for the hole in the egg itself.

Assuming (and I hate doing it, "assuming") that I can get it to work, it should be a really great project.

My issue is this, the customer says she has a bundle of needles about 3/4" in diameter. but my handle stock is only 1 3/16". If i can get a tenon turned to 3/4" or whatever makes it tight enough to hold in place, then i'm good to go. Otherwise I will have to make say a 5/8" hole to start then widen it to 3/4" with a chisel after it gets about a half to 1" in. that shouldn't be too hard either, so we'll see how it goes and what comes of it The head looks like spalted maple or box elder. The client wanted totally maple but the handle will have to be something else I think what I have here is cherry (old) but not sure.

If you had some contrasting wood pieces, you could glue them to the square stock of the handle. This would effectively produce a larger diameter handle, when turned. The contrasting pieces wouldn't need to be very long- an inch or so. Then turn the larger end to the 3/4" diameter (or a little larger) and taper it back into the cherry portion as you turn that round.

I was actually thinking of that very thing. I have several pieces of contrasting wood that I can use. I may not have to use it though as this seems to be doing OK so far for thickness. Thanks for the suggestion Lew.

Well, an update of sorts, the handle piece didn't work out after all because the split on the one end was worse than first thought. So I found a piece of 1"x1" maple and a good contrast wood that I will cut up tomorrow.

When a 12" clamp just wont do You get your Midi lathe to do the clamping for you

Here I am trying to glue the piece I need to make so that I can plug a 3/4" hole for a darning egg as described earlier. The bad part is that it ties up the lathe for at least an hour. If I had a 15" or 20" clamp it would be great but i don't I just have 2 6" and 2 12"

Charles and his darned eggs moved up from the archives.