F. W. Putnam, Instructor Manual Training School, Lowell, Mass.

The amateur who is anxious to learn something of the art of wood turning has doubtless found, in hunting for information, that there is very little literature on the subject, when one considers the importance of the topic. The student who is fortunate in being able to attend a high school having, as one of its electives, a course in Manual Training, will obtain in the Wood Turning part of the course instruction and drill in lathe work, covering practically the ground to be covered in this series of articles. I shall, then, address myself first of all to the boy who has not been so fortunate as to have this chance.

As I have said, very little has been written on this subject, and there is in consequence little chance for arriving at conclusions as to the best method for performing any particular operation ; so, also, there is a wide variation in the use of the different tools by which different operators arrive at the same results. While some turners use one tool almost entirely for a given operation, others will make use of a variety of tools. The exercises which follow are designed to give the operator command of the more commonly used tools, using each for the operations for which it is best fitted.

In the following brief history of the turning lathe, and in the subsequent articles, I have drawn from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Woodward, Hodgson, Golden, and Holtzapfel.

Before starting to study the operations of the wood turner, let us first learn something of the history of the lathe, its mechanism, and the tools to be used in the work.