Introducing Woodturning to Scouts

On Tuesday evening, 22 February, 2016, eight young men and three leaders from the Fairmont 45th Venture Crew of Scouts Canada were hosted at CASA by the Chinook Woodturning Guild. On hand to greet them from the Guild were Vern Miller, Andre´Laroche, Dennis Delaney and Dan Michener.

This came about because Randy Oliver, one of the Venture Crew leaders and the best optometrist in Lethbridge, while examining my eyes last autumn, mentioned that it would be great if the boys could get a woodturning demonstration to expose them to a new experience.  I said we could probably arrange that, and over the next while we came up with a possible program.

We decided on an evening in which I would give an introduction to woodturning, do a demo on making a spinning top and then have each boy get hands-on experience making their own top.  We thought 2 hours ought to be enough time.

I took away a few things from the evening that I will apply in future ventures with Venturers: Don’t spend much time introducing the general topic of woodturning and discussing items in the instant gallery. That stuff is great but leave it for the end if there is time. Introduce the lathe and get on with the demonstration. There is huge variation between the boys in how fast they can complete the hands-on work. Some have little experience with manual coordination or machines and they need the confidence to hold a tool securely and apply it to the wood, others are right there already, so its hard to predict how much time will be required.  No problem if there is extra time at the end because every completed top was immediately in a spin-off with another completed top while other boys were finishing up their own pieces.

My experience of dealing with young men is limited to – none, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. The boys also didn’t know what to expect so we were equally ignorant. In the end we all had a good time; the boys were willing, paid attention and, with a little coaching from their leaders and the woodturners, all completed a spinnable top. I hope they went home happy, I certainly did!

Dan Michener