Turning Square to Round Spindle Transitions

George Vondriska demonstrates a way to eliminate tearout on your spindle turnings when transitioning from your square blank to the round part of your design.

Turning Square to Round Spindle Transitions I'm working on a table leg here and what I want on this leg is to leave the upper section square because I want a rail to mortise into this. Now, the problem I'm up against is that I've done a lot of this turning so far with a gouge. And when I come up to this corner with a gouge, it's very, very prone to tearing and chipping. And as a result, I don’t have a nice crisp transition from square to round. The reason for that is because the gouge is not the best to way to do this, the skew is. What we can do with the skew is come in with the toe of the skew down on the toe will rest, the heel up using this edge vertically to incise its way into that corner. It's going to cut a nice crisp spot then we can work down from there. Let me show you how that works. [Demonstration] All you want to do with that skew is start to cut like I've done here. We don’t need to peel away a lot of wood. What we’re trying to do is just stop my material from splitting upstream from there. So, once I've got this done, now I can go back to my gouge, finish that transition from square to round. [Demonstration] When I come back in and make that cut with the gouge as I look down at it and I can see the part where the skew cut in very sharply. I'm allowing the bevel, the back of the gouge to come into that point but not go past it. So, I want to make sure that I don’t undo the nice work I just did with the skew. So, I've got my gouge really up on its side like this. I'm working its bevel against that transition I created with the skew. That gives me a beautiful transition here from square to round. So, this is a great way to leave a nice sharp corner here so that you can leave behind the square stock on the end to receive your rails.