I have written before how I’m trying to reuse the old lathe that I saved when I redid part of my house. The procedure was basically to plane the lathe, glue it together and then plane it to a smooth thickness. This has produced some very nice boards and I’ve made a couple of nice things with them. The problem is that I’m not enjoying the process. First of all, the planer is freakin’ loud. I wear ear-covering sound mufflers and it still sounds loud to me. I tried using a sander and wet-dry vac, but that’s crazy loud too. As I get older, one thing I’ve noticed about myself is that I like quiet. Another problem is that the planer seems to be breaking a lot. I’ve spent a lot of money on a new set of carbide blades, which have worked well, but cost $249. And I’ve replaced the belt twice. It also generates a tremendous amount of sawdust that gets all over the place. But the main problem is the noise. I like working in the mornings…the earlier the better. But I don’t want to make that much noise. I’m sure my neighbors could hear some of it and I don’t want to be a jerk.

I still want to do something with the lathe though, so what to do. Perhaps I should be planing them by hand. I know, it’s crazy. I’m taking an already ridiculous slow task and making it even slower. But I tried it a little today and I think I might like this more. I took a very old plane that I had and tried planing a piece of lathe. I actually enjoyed it. The scraping makes a very pleasant sound as you go across the wood. It generates thin strips of wood and not sawdust. This should be easier to clean up. I think it might be kind of relaxing to do this after work. I could listen to music while I’m doing it, which would be great. Problems? Yes, this is even slower. More importantly, I don’t really have a good way to clamp the lathe down while I’m trying to plane. I also think it would be nice to have a shorter table to plane on, since I could see my back not enjoying the height of my current workbench. I also don’t know much about hand planes. I’m guessing I’d have to sharpen the blade a lot and I have no idea how to do this. But even with these problems, I’m liking this idea. I’m going to give it a try and see how it goes.