Hey, I'm Bob and I like to make stuff.
Today, we're going to make a really weird rolling pin.
A while back, I was looking around on Pinterest,
and I ran across a picture of a rolling pin made for making ravioli.
And it dawned on me at that moment that I had no idea
how ravioli was made before that.
It was kind of a cool looking object
and I wasn't really sure how they were put together,
so I decided to give it a shot.
I don't really have any need to make ravioli, but I do like the idea
of being able to deconstruct something
and figure out how to make your own.
In fact, the more I think about it
I would actually rather have one of these
for making little dessert ravioli,
rather than real ravioli.
Alright, let's give it a shot and see how it goes.
I had a couple pieces of teak and a nice slab of cherry
that I wanted to use.
I ran it through the planer a a couple of times
just to clean off both faces
so that they would glue together nicely.
I cut off one edge of this using the fence
and then laid that cut edge against
the fence to cut two equal strips.
Once I had both of these cut,
I used one of them as a spacer
to set up a stop block on my miter saw,
then turn the piece and cut a bunch of squares.
I added quite a bit of glue to one side
of each of these pieces
and used a brush to spread it around,
trying to make sure that it covered as much as possible.
I stacked all these up and put it in the clamps.
While those were drying in the clamps,
I ran both of my strips over the table saw
to make sure that they were the same thickness.
After a couple of hours I was pretty sure
that all the glue had dried,
so I took it out of the clamps
and then used a straight edge
going from corner to corner
on each end to find a center point.
Really quickly, I want to point out a mistake
that I made so that you can avoid it.
After I glued up that block, I forgot
to scrape off the outsides and square it up as a block.
In a second, I'm going to run it over the table saw,
and when I did that, it actually wasn't
laying flat against the table.
At the time, it didn't seem like that big of a deal,
but it actually changed the depth
of the cuts for each one of the slots that I was making.
So even though it wasn't that
big of a deal at the moment,
it did have some effects down the line.
Just learn from my mistake,
square up your block before you
take it to the table saw.
I swapped out my table saw blade
for a dado stack that was the same width
as the strips that I had cut just a little while ago.
I made sure that it was also set to the same height.
I set the fence so this piece was centered
over the blade and then I ran it through four times,
making a slot on each side of this piece.
I chucked it up in the lathe
and started tearing it down to a cylinder.
While I'm doing that,
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I wanted to keep the cylinder
as large as I could, but also get rid
of any flat spots.
I kept checking it and taking a little bit more off,
and eventually I got it down to a pretty good cylinder.
I used some sandpaper
at a much slower speed
to smooth out the surface.
The edges of the slots were
a little rough too, so I just ran
over them with sandpaper
and they smoothed right up.
Back on the miter saw,
I set up a stop block
so I could slice the cylinder
down into pieces.
I set it at the same thickness
of my original material,
so basically I was cutting through
all of the glue lines when
I had made up this block.
Being a circle, this was actually pretty hard to do
I was worried about it rolling,
so I used a clamp to hold it
against the back fence.
Then eventually it got to small to safely hold,
so I moved to the cross-cut sled
to finish it up.
I laid out the strips and then
set all the pieces in place,
figuring out how thick they were
and how much gap I needed in between them.
I marked this out on a piece of wood
so I knew how long to cut my strips.
I cut four strips down.
Before I assembled it,
I decided to take advantage of my laser
and put my logo on the end of one of these.
Then I just added some glue to the strips
and started knocking everything together.
You can see here that things
don't line up perfectly because
of the issue I talked about earlier.
It was close enough that I could
kind of brute force it into shape,
but in the future, I would definitely
square up that block
before I did anything else.
I made sure to add glue
on all three of the surfaces
where these strips were pushed in,
and try to make sure that everything
was forced all the way
down to the bottom of the slot.
Then I got out my trusty clamps,
and tried to make sure that
every connection had some pressure on it
so that it would dry nice and tight.
I also wiped off as much glue from the inside
as I could before it dried.
That made it a lot easier.
Eventually, after this was dry and
out of the clamps,
I took it to the sander to try
to smooth out those strips.
They were a little bit proud
in some places, again,
because of the issue I mentioned earlier.
I finished up just by going over the whole thing
with a fine sanding pad.
For finishing, I used a combination of
bees wax and mineral oil,
but you could use anything that's food-safe,
anything that you would use on a cutting board
would work great here.
Then it was time to try it out.
Of course you can make real ravioli,
but I actually just wanted dessert.
I rolled it over a pie crust
and this left some small indentations
that showed me where I needed
to put the filling.
I just used some pie filling,
put in a few globs,
and laid over another pie crust.
Then I rolled back over it and
it actually worked.
I was really surprised.
I thought about making this tool
as well and I might in the future,
but I just used a cutter to cut them up,
put them in the oven,
let them cook for about seven or eight minutes,
and I had some nice little pies.
That turned out to be pretty cool
and I was actually really happy that it worked.
I was a little concerned that the spaces
were going to be too close together,
it wasn't going to be big enough,
and I realized that I had made it longer
than it was wide,
so they were going to be kind of weird looking.
Using it for desserts actually
worked out perfectly because
now they look like little tiny pies.
In case you were wondering,
that was just a pie filling inside some
store-bought pie crust
at 450 degrees for about 7 minutes.
This may not be a thing that you use
in your kitchen very often,
I know I probably won't.
But it was a really cool challenge
to figure out how to replicate it.
And also, I'm always looking for projects
that give me an excuse
to practice on my new lathe.
Anyway, this was a fun thing to
figure out how to do.
I'd love to know what you think about it.
Let me know down in the comments.
I've got lots of other project videos
of all different types so be sure
to check those out.
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That's it for this one.
Thanks for watching guys.
I'll see you next time.