Making My Own Turning Tools

I recently attended the AAW Woodturners Symposium. I attended a session on making one's own tools. 

I am beginning to regret going to the tool making session. Since then, there are few pieces of metal in my workshop that I don’t look at and envision a woodturning tool that I can make from it.

But today, I worked with the little pieces of tooling steel that I bought from Harbor Freight.

5 Piece M2 High Speed Steel Mini Lathe Bits

Starting with the flat piece, I made a 1/16 mini-cutoff tool:

I insert half of this into a piece of 1/2” tube steel that I bought at Home Depot. Fortunately, it was a bit to small to fit in there, so I put the tube diagonally into my large bench vice and compressed it along the diagonal. This made the other diagonal slightly larger. I did this until my piece of tool steel (well, half of it) fit into the tool. I then took it out of the vice and the tool steel was held securely.

Next I put the end of a half inch rod (Home depot again) and first drilled a 1/8” pilot hole into the end and then a 1/4” hole. My tool steel (half again) just fit into this. I used CA glue:

I did not get the hole exactly straight, but if anyone notices, I will then them that it was intentional.

Next I took some square rod and ground the end to about 45 degrees. I drilled through it use the same drill sequence and inserted the medium tool steel into the hole. I had to grind the edges of the tool steel slightly for it to fit. I am using CA glue again, but it has not yet hardened:

I plan to grind off the back once the CA glue hardens. I like this because the square rod will sit on the tool rest and tend to hold the tool at the correct angle.

I also made a tool from a shelf bracket I had kicking around. Took less than a minute:

I have tried them all except the square one. The seem to work fine. Not sure how long they will hold and edge. I will just sharpen as needed.

At one point, I had an idea that if the tool would ALMOST fit into the hole I had drilled, all I had to do was to heat the hole to red hot thus causing it to expand enough to admit the tool steel. I was unable to get this to work.