Turning Mallets on Bike Lathes in Honduras
Building on the bicycle lathe workshop GreenWood held in Honduras in 2016, we returned to the North Coast in July 2017 to install a second bike lathe and conduct a training session in the production of turned carving mallets (for export to Lee Valley Tools). The main event took place in the La Ceiba workshop of our partner organization Madera Verde, where we began by reviewing and tweaking the condition of the first lathe, following a year of service. Then, working with parts donated by the American Association of Woodturners (AAW), we built and installed a second bike lathe in Santa María del Carbon—the indigenous Pech community where GreenWood first trained artisan chairmakers in 1993. The construction and training, led by the lathe designer, Scotty Lewis, focused on testing several lesser-known wood species and fine-tuning lathe skills, leading to the production of a line of prototype carving mallets.