Spatula

   A few weeks ago when I was making some banister spindle replacements on my seldom used wood lathe, I discovered that I kind of enjoyed watching the wood chips fly into the air as I shoved those chisels into a turning piece of wood.   Because of that, lately I have found myself looking on the internet at small projects that can be done on the wood lathe.
  I still have a lot of hard maple stored in my scrap wood pile.   Maple that I had milled from a tree that once stood on the North side of our garage.

   I have a tendency to shy away from working with those rough cut maple boards that I have on hand.    My little "poor man" tools have to be pretty sharp to work with that stuff.   Yet once cleaned up and sanded, hard maple always looks great.   Also maple can be a little spendy if you have to go out to the wood store and purchase some so I try to save all the little left over pieces that I can.

     From the two boards pictured above I cut out the forms of two spatulas.    As mentioned before I saved all the little extras.   (I'm thinking there will always be more cutting boards and additional little toy cars in my future.)   Now this is my first run at making wooden kitchen utensils and I would like to take credit for the design etc., but this spatula idea came from watching a YouTube video.   (You can just about find anything on YouTube now-a-days.)
 I turned the handle on the wood lathe.
From there I went to the band saw and cut several angle cuts.  One was to do a very find edge on the front of the spatula tapering that cut back to the handle edge.   At this point I was very proud of my creation.  Next according to the video I was watching I tapered the front edge and the sides and I have to say that this was the point where I became very disappointed.     I'm not sure why they suggested that you do this.

 Maybe it helps to keep the edge flat on the pan's bottom when you are using it.   I don't know, but if and when I ever make another one of these again I will probably leave the spatula edges more square.   Next came the sanding.   (And the sanding and again more sanding.)   I finished by applying a food safe oil    When it was all done you could say that I created two very nice spatulas.  (Or you could say that I possibly created two very nice spanking sticks.)

  I asked Pam to try out one of those new spatulas last night.   You know -- maybe see if that hard maple could hold the weight of flipping over two very heavy rib eye steaks on the grill.   She reminded me that because of my frequent online tool shopping lately,  we are now on a hamburger diet rather than a steak diet.    It looks like it did work well on chopping up hamburger in the pan and stirring it around.  


  I enjoyed doing this project.   I would say that at this point someday you will probably see another blog or two on the crafting of additional wooden kitchen utensils.   I think it would also be safe to assume that you shouldn't look forward (even if you are one of my favorites) to any wooden spatulas being placed under the Christmas tree this year.  (It wasn't that much fun.)

  Okay! Okay!   It's okay to come back into the house.     I was only joking about making spanking sticks.