Rob Johnston recently suggested to me that we do an article on turning a Japanese toy called kendama it’s a slight challenge to turn and a great deal of fun to play good for children of all ages most of it is straight spindle turning the only difficult part is scraping these cups to an exact radius that’s a little smaller in the ball so it rests nicely in there and to turn the ball itself I have a jam Chuck here which is no more than a good sized block of wood that I’ve screwed to a faceplate and I have the makings of a ball I started with a two and a half inch diameter block of wood that was three inches long and I’ve turned it down to two and three eighths which is the diameter we want from the ball by using an arm rest in a scraper here and just scraping like that at a slight angle I now have an opening that I can put this into and I’ll simply take a mallet here there I have it running pretty well perfectly take it just a scraper the same one we use to make the jamb Chuck with and we’re going to we want this to be dead flat and we want to move remove all trace of the center that held that when we turned it round I’m nice and flat you’re going to just barely knock that corner off and now I’ll take and put a little pencil mark right at the center like so and I’m going to set a set a divider or a really a compass here to the radius of our ball and I’ll set that distance off on the ball like so and that’s what I call an equator and now I’ll take a spindle gouge and I’m going to turn this material way all the material that lies outside of the sphere I’m really turning an ellipse that lies outside of the sphere that runs from near the equator – near the dot that would be the pole there that looks pretty good and now I’ll take my mallet and take that out of the truck like so then simply turn it around and kind of try to arrange it so that the old equator here is running perfect we’ll take our compass and lay off another radius here that is the other end of our ball and park that right and I’m going to take my scraper and just clean that face book now I do the same thing again you and the trick now is to take this sort of eggy looking device and put it in the truck and get it so the old equator is running between the centres of the lathe and if we tap that and we turn our lathe on if we’ve done our work right we’ll get the ghost of a sphere from the equator itself we’re pretty close we’ve got a dot that’s just off the equator I’ll do a little correction in there now if I put a heavy black dot there as you can see it lies right on the equator and now all I have to do is take a scraper like this and scrape off the ghost because the equator is a perfect circle running between centers it’s ghosting a perfect sphere and all I have to do is now scrape away everything that is in the ball you can kind of tell when it goes round because you can feel it you can probably hear the kind of rattling hopping sound of the fact that we have an interrupted cut and you can very much feel it and when that goes away as it is right here you are round and it’s good just to take a check sometimes we’re coming up on the line and see how we’re turning it away there now that I’ve scraped off all of the pencil line that was the old equator I will now make a new equator right here and I often make a couple of them that allows me to get this running 180 degrees out so I can complete the other half of the ball there you can see that we have half of a perfect ball emerging from this egg like gizmo we turned when you simply put that back in the truck like so and sort of line up that equator and now all I have to do is scrape the other half of this ball now that we’ve scraped the second half tis a good time to drill a hole because we have it we can drill right into the end grain on the pole we want to drill in here about an inch and a half to two inches and scrape a little paper right here by putting a little slope opening that up a little bit like that that’ll make a bigger target when you spike the ball and make the game a little easier to play now it’s time to sand our ball and you want to start with 80 grit sandpaper or even coarser and if you don’t use really coarse paper to start with you’ll sand the plank grain or face grain faster than the end grain and you’ll actually see in the ball out around now that I’ve turned the ball I’m Jim chucking the cups in another Jam Chuck a smaller one that I and will now scrape the pockets that capture the ball in the game and we’ll do that with this scraper that we made by grinding a two inch radius on the end of a file or in this case an old chisel that I had laying in the drawer and this is an easy way to get this just right notice I have the scraper downhill and I’m taking progressive light cuts using the edge of the scraper like so Oh
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Kendama Facts