Titebond: Create A Striped Rolling Pin

This rolling pin, more specifically French rolling pin, is a great project. It's very easy to do. The turning skills are pretty fundamental, but by adding stripes to it we can give it a really cool look, great gift, and you're gonna want one for yourself as well. So make a few when you're rolling into this project. See what I did there?

What you wanna do to get going, couple things. Bunch of thin strips. The strips in this selection vary from 1/2 inch thick down to a little over 1/8 of an inch thick. It's nice to have some variation there just gives you a visual change when you're making your rolling pit. The other thing that's handy is to have a template that we're eventually gonna use to make the blank for the rolling pin.

If you have Plexiglass in your shop, it's nice to use Plexiglass for this. The reason being that even now when I'm laying this out, I can lay the plexiglass on there and get a feel for what the blank is gonna look like because of course I can see through the plexiglass. So what I mean by all this is that now we are to the. Let's arrange the strips stage. What I wanna do is not end up with a light colored strip next to a light colored strip and then I also wanna provide a variation of staggering the skinnier stuff into the mix here.

So let's see what happens. I think that's gonna look pretty good. So let's talk gluing. I'm gonna put this together with yon 3 using that glue for a bunch of reasons. It's waterproof, so over the life of my rolling pin getting cleaned up and used and everything else you do with the rolling pin, that glue is gonna hold up great.

It's also food safe. A number of type on products are food safe, and you can check that out just by reading the label and seeing if the product you're after is. Gonna set up my clamps. And the next. Spread a bunch of glue.

The other thing I'll point out is that when I'm doing a big strip glue up like this, I like to have a thick one on the outside. And a thick one on the outside as opposed to ending. With a thin, the reason being that that thicker strip is gonna act like a clamping call on the outside here to make sure that. When we apply clamping pressure, it closes everything. If the thin strip is on the outside, it's not as effective a call.

What I did is I put that type on 3 in a roller bottle. Let's talk about. The mechanics of where this whole thing is going on the rolling pin. The large diameter here in the center is 1 3/4 inch. So when I prep those pieces for the blank, they're 2 inches wide right now and then the resulting blank I'm going to make to turn this will be 2 by 2.

So in other words, my template is also 2 inches wide. Having the template when you're ready to glue this up is also beneficial because I can lay that on the blank. I can lay that on the big blank and make sure that I have enough there to get 2 or 3 or 6 rolling pins, however many you want to make. If you didn't have this in your hand to lay on there and establish that angle, the angle is what gives us that cool look, then it would be hard to know if I've glued up enough pieces here. With the material you wanna make sure you use something that's what we would call close grain so that means the pores on the wood are very closed good examples would be walnut, maple, cherry.

Bad examples would be something like red oak red oak is a very porous open grain wood. Additionally, they're all hardwoods meaning. They're physically hard, so they're gonna hold up as a rolling pin very well. Pine would be a real bad choice for a rolling pin so closed grained hardwoods and what you're looking at here, it's ash, cherry, walnut, maple, and zebra wood. Next step is watch glue dry and then we can come back and cut our blanks.

After the glue is dry, this is where we really need the template that we're gonna use to create the blank, and this is where it's really, really, really handy if that template is made out of Plexiglas rather than just a piece of 1/4 inch plywood if you have Plexiglass. What we wanna do is lay the template on there and look for our pattern. What we don't want to do is come like way over here. We're not trying to get one rolling pin out of this. We're trying to get a couple.

The other problem with a real stark angle like this is that your rolling pin is gonna end up with what we call short grain in the middle and maybe it could break on somebody one day so we wanna keep this angle shallow. I've got the left side of the pattern pretty close to the upper left corner and then I'm not gonna trace yet I'm just gonna mark here. And here because what I wanna know is if I use that angle and I, I like it as far as steepness goes and then I come here. Is there enough room to get a second blank out of this and. There is, so now I am gonna trace.

Doing this And thus. Given us. Enough real estate for 2. Angled striped rolling pin blanks to come out of this bandsaw is a great way to cut this. You can do this as just a free hand cut on your bandsaw.

As a byproduct, maybe you can come up with a cool use for those if nothing else, you got the coolest doorstep ever as a waste cut with your blanks. Run those to the miter sauce, square off the ends and get them set up to go on the lathe spur center tails stock, and we'll have a look at what it takes to turn this into a French rolling pin. First step on this, get your blank round. Then here's what we've got some dimensions for you. I'm shooting for a finish length of 20 inches.

10 inches in the middle are 1 and 3/4. That's what I'm gonna do next and then out here at the end, the end of the tapered handle is 1 inch diameter end of this tapered handle is 1 inch diameter. So next thing I'm gonna do. I get calipers set. To 1 and 3/4.

And we'll get that diameter going in the middle. Once you're sanded, Grab a food safe finish. And this is always the fun part when finish hits the material, especially on a striped rolling pin like this, this is gonna look crazy cool. I love how that looks now just a couple more steps. When this is dry, get that off the lathe.

And cut the ends, then we want those ends to be just slightly rounded and you can easily do that off the lathe with hand sanding or maybe a random orbit sander but just kind of knock that corner off at the end of those tapers. Probably gonna take one more coat after this coat soaks in. It's a really fun project, a great turning project, and make sure that you're using the right glue. Tight bond 3 is a great choice for this. This is a great gift, great housewarming gift if you've got a baker in your life, they're gonna love these.