Mistakes and lessons...
Don't make the skittles from a harder wood than the rest of the game
Firstly it puts dents in the ball and box when the skittles fall over, but also
it blunts the tools quickly when turning and sanding. They look lovely with a close grain, but doing it again I'd chose a softer wood for the skittles
Top down routing
The shopsmith is a very competent tool, however it is very poor at top down routing when working a piece of wood more than 10mm deep.
The problem is that it is really hard to hold the work stable when it's 100mm from the work surface, it becomes far too easy to
chip and splinter the wood, The case of the Bar Skittles has suffered from this.
Making a sphere
This proved a good challenge. Eventually I found the method was to turn and square to a cylinder then rotate the cylinder through 90
degrees and turn another a cylinder. this gets close but it's not possible to work the ends, so a wooden 'cup' was made and put in the lathe
to support the sphere for final rounding and sanding.
