Lathe Turning Kitchen Island Legs

These are a set of Barley twisted kitchen Island legs that I made for a customer in Arizona. You do know what island legs are? These are the decorative (and sometimes structural) legs that support kitchen island overhangs (where the counter-top overhangs the cabinet island).

The island legs I most often make are 3 1/2" by 36 inches. These particular alder island legs are7" x 36". The twists on these island legs are called a barley twist. They are made in two steps.

Turning: After gluing up alder stock, the blanks are mounted on the lathe. A hydraulic copy lathe works much like the key maker we use to make duplicate keys at the hardware store. We bring an original house key to the hardware guy and he mounts the original onto the back of the key copy machine. And as he traces the original key a cutter is making a new key. The lathe is very similar in how it works. The tracer on the back of the machine is tracing an aluminum template and as the tracer is moving in and out the lathe cutter precisely follows the tracer. The turning blank is spinning and the cutter is making the new turning.

Milling:The second step is making the barley twist on the new turning profile. First the milling unit (which is like a large router) is mounted on the machine. The barley twisted cutter is mounted on the milling unit. My machine has an onboard computer for setting the pitch, lateral speed and the number of starts. I suspect this is similar to making screws. Same geometry. After milling the barley twist comes the sanding - yikes!

The image above is of a set of table legs rather than island legs. These were used by a customer of mine to make a dinning table. They are turned from red oak and employ a square at the bottom for installing a "stretcher" between the legs. Stretchers were used originall y for support near the bottom of the table legs. Now they are more often used as a design element.