I happened upon an awesome video today of outdoor woodturning by a “bodger” and TreeWright blogger from the UK–thanks to a tweet by the Renaissance Woodworker.

This is about as green as it gets. The seven minute clip made me exhausted just watching as the blogger split, sawed, shaved, turned, and drilled a greenwood log without any power tools. This all happened in the great outdoors using a collection of rustic tools and supports. Yeah, there’s one power drill… and a totally out-of-place orange sawhorse/workbench but everything else seemed totally 19th century to me… All this work for a spinning top…

TreeWright made it look pretty simple, but if you want to make one for a holiday gift, I’d suggest you start practicing now.

Also, if you get the chance… read up on bodgers. I guess these old-school turners used to make Windsor chair parts… but “Often they lived and set up a workshop deep within the forest rather than fell the timber and take it home with them. So only finished components left the forest.”

Their kind of “portable workshop” is pretty hard to imagine these days when you need heavy-duty casters and fancy hoverpads just to get equipment from one side of the shop to the other.

Bodgers used foot-powered “pole lathes” and had to make a gross of parts to make any money at it, “about 3 minutes per leg!,” according to TreeWright. Yikes! Now that’s a rough life…