Turning a Reel Seat Spacer 

Turning a reel seat spacer is very easy, and allows you control over the quality of the wood you choose. I'll show you how to turn a spacer using a 9x20" import lathe, but you could just as easily do it on the Sherline. I like using the 9x20 lathe because the power feed makes the task go very quickly. Of course, you want to be safe, too, so follow all pertinate safety procedures with your tools!

If you are gonna 'turn your own', though, don't just jump all willy-nilly into cutting and turning the wood. Before you start, look carefully at the figure of the wood and determine how to best cut it to show off the figure! Same goes with cutting the mortise! The better rodbuilders take note of things like centering a nice figure in the mortise instead of randomly on the blank. Ditto with determining which end of the block will be the bottom or top end.

The first step is to drill the hole in the spacer. The reason for drilling the hole before the stock is turned is to insure the spacer will be turned concentric with the bore. Two common bores are used, 5/16" and 3/8". The smaller is typically used on small and medium cap and ring seats, the large on larger cap and ring seats and screw locks. It's nice to start with a nice, square block of wood(even better is a dowel...less turning!), but it's not necessary. I rough out reel seat blanks by eye on the bandsaw, and they are about 1" square by 4" long. You'll see how 'rough' they are below.

To bore the wood I recommend brad-point drills as these tend to drill without wandering. To drill the hole I mount a 4-jaw self-centering chuck on the lathe and insert the wood, and tighten the jaws lightly. I'll spin the chuck by hand to eyeball how well the blank is centered and adjust if necessary, then tighten down the chuck on the wood.

The brad-point drill is held in a Jacob's chuck in the tailstock. Note the little pin sticking up on the tailstock barrel!

The pin is a 1/8" dowel pin. I drilled a 1/8" hole through the tailstock ram and into the Jacob's chuck MT2 taper, thusly:

The purpose of the holes and pin is to keep the Jacob's chuck seated on the tailstock taper. This comes in handy for how I drill the hole. I DO NOT use use the tailstock quill feed handle to advance the drill into the stock because it has less travel than the length of the spacer, plus it's slow and tiring to keep advancing and withdrawing the drill to clear chips. Clearing the chips is important!!! You want to 'peck' deep holes by advancing the bitt and withdrawing it constantly to keep chips from packing in the flutes. Chip packing will cause the drill to wander and heat to build up. So, the way I do this is to stand at the end of the lathe with the bed lock on the tailstock loosened slightly, allowing the tailstock to slide along the bed ways yet still securely attached to the ways. This allows me to push the entire tailstock from the end, and pull it back by hand to clear the chips. The dowel pin keeps the Jacob's chuck locked onto the taper of the quill. YOU MUST use the pin to keep the Jacob's chuck locked onto the tailstock taper. If you don't, you might pull back on the tailstock and have the drill and Jacob's chuck get caught in the spinning wood and pull free from the tailstock taper!! Yikes! This is an incredibly fast method, and in soft woods you can drill and peck your way through the bore in seconds.

I'll continue pecking until the spacer is drilled through. Needless to say, it's most efficient to do these tasks in large batches to save time. So, I'll cut a bunch of blocks, then drill them all, then turn them all, etc. The next steps are for turning the spacer. I've mounted the blank onto one of our reel seat mandrils. At the chuck end I'm using an 7/16"  ER40 flex collet, and the mandril is supported on the tailstock end with a live center. You can also chuck the assembly in a 3 or 4 jaw chuck, or use a chuck or faceplate and lathe dog. I like the ER40. It's unobtrusive, and there's less vibration and more safety than spinning a large 3 or 4 jaw chuck at 1,000- 2,000 rpm!

The idea for the mandril came from working with my Hardinge lathe, where chucks and faceplates are attached onto a nose taper. In addition, in metalworking it's sometimes necessary to make a 'stub arbor' to hold a part, so the mandril works in much the same way. Friction keeps the wood in place and it's much easier and less cumbersome to use than drill rod and nuts to hold the wood for turning.

To cut the spacer you can use a HSS tool, but here I've mounted my quick change tool post with a CCGT32.52 carbide insert. The insert has a nice radius on the nose, so you can feed fast and have a minimum of sanding to cleanup the tool marks.

Depending on how the wood is cutting, I'll turn at 1,000 to 2,000 RPM and a feed of .005 to .007, with fairy heavy depths of cut. If the wood begins to spin on the mandril, I'll disengage the feed, turn off the lathe and push the block further up onto the tapered portion on the mandril, and on my next pass take a lighter cut.

The wood is taken down to size in a series of passes. I aim for .001 oversize to allow for a little sanding and grain filling. Once I reach that mark, I make a note of the position of the crossfeed dial with a red magic marker. Once the first spacer is to size, you no longer need to measure, just cut each one to the mark on the dial!:

In the next pic, a little void has popped up near the tailstock. Since the wood is longer than the finished spacer length, I may be able to trim it off to eliminate it, or fill it. In this case, I'm turning walnut and I'm going to fill the grain anyway, so I'll just fill it. I use Timber Mate filler and just apply it by hand with the lathe off. While the filler is drying, you can either take a break or start turning your next piece of wood.

Here the filler is applied. Once the filler sets up, I sand with 220 grit. You can progress to finer grits, if necessary.

The next step is to cut the shoulder. For this example I'm cutting this a spacer for a Struble seat, so using a Struble stock spacer to lay out the shoulder length.

The shoulder is turned to the correct OD. Again the dial is marked so I don't need to measure for the next one:

All that's left now is to pop off the wood from the mandril, trim to length and apply finish. Happy turning!

Copyright 2012 J.D. Wagner, Inc.