Custom Wood Turning

It would probably be the commemorative cherry wood mortar shells for the military. That was a batch of really large bullets! A close second would be the request for several hundred wood spindles to be painted black and joined by mono-filament to make a giant 3-dimensional net covering the walls of a starlet’s bedroom. That was unique!

It’s much more common in custom wood turning to fill requests for columns and capitals. We’re really good at that. We also make lots of balusters and newel posts. House parts – porch posts, replacement spindles and architectural finials – we make by the score. What we can turn for you is limited only by your imagination.

We are happy to work from your specifications. Or, we can make drawings for your approval from sketches and photos. An amazing amount of the design dialog can take place via email and telephone. For example, we made some parts for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in England. We never met the folks, just emailed a few drawings back and forth, visited on the phone a bit and shipped the parts ‘across the pond’ without a hitch, just in time for the season opener.

Because our standard wood turnings are so well rooted in the “old way of seeing,” we have become sought after by conservationists to reproduce custom wood turnings of a historical nature. We are very accustomed to sleuthing beneath decades of lead paint for true dimensions and detail. We are also adept at using mostly rotted house parts as patterns for accurate replication and replacement of period-perfect wood turnings.

If you find a furniture part on our website that you like, but need it only slightly modified, we can do that easily. Just click here for details. Also, please note the custom wood parts don’t have to be just wood turnings in the strictest sense of making wooden parts round. Using sophisticated CNC machinery combined with Yankee ingenuity, we’ve custom made specialty items from square table legs to wooden seats for rope swings and lots of finely crafted items in between.

We stock the most popular wood species used in wood turning, some intended for fine furniture projects and some species well suited for outdoor wood turnings. If it is not a species we normally carry, we are happy to quote you a price using special wood that you supply. We have experience with FSC-certified wood and can work with you to achieve your environmental objectives concerning the parts we supply to you.

We really enjoy the custom wood turning projects - they add variety and challenge to our workday. We are sticklers about good design, and helping you get the wood parts you want gives us our greatest satisfaction. With the ease of modern communications and the flexibility of modern woodworking equipment, the process of custom wood turning moves quickly. We can deliver the custom parts to your door, in less time than you might think, for less money than you might think, too!