Generally wood turning in know for making wood into round shapes but other things are possible if you know how to do them, lately I had reason to make an oval handle.
What happened is that I was placing an order for some hardware that I was getting low on and decided to try out a new style of pizza cutter. When my order arrived I was surprised to see that, although there was no mention of it in the included instructions, it would be best to make the handle oval where it joined this hardware.
I haven’t made many oval handles before but I have experimented enough to know that it can be done. The way to do it involves using three different centres during the turning process. Starting with the standard centre in the middle the handle is first made round. Then the centre is moved off to one side to create the first side of the oval and then moved an equal distance to the other side of the original centre to create the other side of the oval. This is the layout sketch that I made to figure out where my three centres needed to be.
I was pretty happy with how it turned out, and on my first attempt too. Here I have already trimmed the tenon and drilled a hole for the tang on the pizza cutter so you can’t see where I placed the three centres but I just followed the sketch above. I only made the tenon and about the first two inches oval before blending it into a round shape higher up.
Test fitting the oval handle to the hardware. I think this is going to be quite a nice pizza cutter. There is a bit of figure in the maple wood used for the handle that will look good once the finishing is complete.
