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My wife brought home a wooden bowling pin from work. I want to make a lamp out of it. What would be the best way to drill it out?

BPR

ryanbp01 wrote:My wife brought home a wooden bowling pin from work. I want to make a lamp out of it. What would be the best way to drill it out?

BPR

Very carefully and use a LONG bit.

ryanbp01 wrote:My wife brought home a wooden bowling pin from work. I want to make a lamp out of it. What would be the best way to drill it out?

BPR

I wood use a long bitand use the Mark V in horizontal boring mode. Create a jig to hold the pin in place and clamp said jig/pin to table, lined up with the bit. Drill the first part of your hole and back the bit out. Move the table closer to the quill, until the bit is close to touching the end of that hole. Drill the hole deeper, back the drill out and slide the table/jig/pin off the bit to clear the shavings. Repeat until you have drilled through the pin.


There a quite a few 18" drill bit choices here. From 3/16" to 1" diameters. These are Bell Hanger bits.

ryanbp01 wrote:My wife brought home a wooden bowling pin from work. I want to make a lamp out of it. What would be the best way to drill it out?

BPR

there is a discussion over on the woodturners forum that gets into specifics on long hole boring:
http://www.woodworkforums.com/archive/i ... 85820.html

they seem to be recommending the use of a lamp auger and a hollow tail stock such as:
http://www.woodturnerscatalog.com/store ... lamp_auger

and
http://www.woodturnerscatalog.com/store ... ters?Args=

sounds like the big issues are whether the auger is long enough after you allow for the length of the tailstock and it being very critical to clean out the hole after every inch of boring if you don't want to jam the auger or make it wander off.

of course, this approach still begs the question of how to chuck the pin in a chuck or getting a drive center to hold.

good luck,
Ivan

iclark wrote: of course, this approach still begs the question of how to chuck the pin in a chuck or getting a drive center to hold.

good luck,
Ivan

Since bowling pins have a flat bottom - attaching to a faceplate should offer no problem. (only centering)

If using the lathe, the hole would be bored from the top. It shouldn't matter if the hole wanders a little off center at the bottom. There would have to be a way for the cord to come out anyway.

Reference for visual method on a lathe: http://www.shopsmith.net/forums/showpos ... stcount=16

Is your bowling pin the old style with the wood all the way to the outside finish? Or is it a modern one with a wood core and a plastic sheath on the outside? If it is the latter you may be less than pleased with the wood you find when you get the plastic cut off. The ones I have opened utilized sub quality laminated wood with no shortage of voids. Went through several pins to find one good enough to turn a mallet.
Roger

My dad brought home some bowling pins for me to play with on the lathe years ago. The ones that he got were coated/finished in laquer. Turned well, but what they were REALLY good for was a fireplace starter. One pin under a couple logs and a single piece of paper and you've got a roaring fire in minutes.

Alaskans wrote:Is your bowling pin the old style with the wood all the way to the outside finish? Or is it a modern one with a wood core and a plastic sheath on the outside? If it is the latter you may be less than pleased with the wood you find when you get the plastic cut off. The ones I have opened utilized sub quality laminated wood with no shortage of voids. Went through several pins to find one good enough to turn a mallet.
Roger

Wow! I didn't know that! Thanks for the heads up, Roger!

It has been many years since I set pins. I think I was ages 12 and 13. They were solid Maple and got pretty heavy at the end of the night. This was, of course, before the advent of automatic pin setters.

Also, When I visited the Forest Products Lab in Madison, with Wisconsin's Utilization Forester - had a tour of many Wisconsin secondary wood manufacturers. Bowling pins were made in one of the plants. At that time (About 1970) they were still being made of Maple.

OKAY, Charlese. It appears that even as kids we might have had some common background.

When you were a pin setter, were you in the pin manually spotting on pegs that came up out of the deck or are you from the modern era of Brunswick A10s.

I set pins on the old pin spotter. The one with the foot pedal that brought pegs up out of the deck at each pin location. I did that one bowling season only. Never again. Far too much work for $0.05 a game. On league night, that netted a full $1.50 for 2-2/1/2 hours work in the pit.

The A10s were as bit better but still too dangerous.

I just wish I could get my hands on some of that old maple that those pit areas were made of or the alleys themselves. Not the newer ones but the old ones. The ones that were new when you and I were dumb enough to set pins.

Oh Yeah! This was one of the jobs, where I could get spending money!

Had to jump up on a shelf and lift feet so they didn't get smashed by flying pins and a heavy ball. After picking up the ball and giving it a shove in the oak runners to return it. (Had to lift each ball about 4½ ft. (this was shoulder high at the time)) Then had to pick up the pins, assuming it wasn't a strike, and put them into an elevated rack. After the second ball, did the same things and pushed down a bar which lowered the pins and spotted them. The rack was spring loaded and required me to jump up and push down. It was almost like doing a chin-up.

Whew! It made me tired, just writing about it. Ahhh! reminiscences.

Yes, Brunswick pins. Don't remember the name of the pin rack, but it was probably also a Brunswick. So were the pins I saw being made when in Wisconsin.