A honey dipper is a great turn­ing project for new turners. It gives you a great opportuni­ty to practice spindle turning techniques with the blank mounted between centers on your wood-turning lathe. It is also a good project for practic­ing your skills using a skew.

Since this is a useable utensil, the wood selected to make it must be non-toxic and it must not add any unwanted taste when it is used. Two such woods are birch, and maple. There are others but a study on that issue is beyond the scope of this article. The finish you use must also be food safe. I appropriately used beeswax for this project.

Basic Design

A honey dipper is made by mak­ing some deep grooves at one end of a round piece of wood, and creating a smooth, curved handle on the oth­er. Decorative touches such as beads, coves, burned-in or captive rings, etc., can be added as desired. This project will yield a finished honey dipper about 1 ¼” in diameter by 8″ in overall length. The grooved section will be about 2″ long and the handle will be about 6″ long to get into those deep jars of hon­ey. These dimensions can be modified as long as the basic proportions are maintained.

I used a billet of straight-grained dry maple 1 ½” x 1 ½” x 9″ long with no inclusions. This will help prevent the utensil from breaking during use and not allow unwanted holes to trap honey. I did not draw a plan for this project since it is not a complicated design; turning it “free style” is a much more practical method, in my opinion.

Preparing the Blank

Inspect the billet and choose which end will have the grooves. Sometimes the grain pattern will dictate which direction looks the best. Locate and dimple the centers of both ends of the blank. With a 4-prong, or spring type spur center in the headstock, and a live center in the tailstock, mount the blank between the lathe’s centers. Place the end where the grooves will be located at the headstock end. This is not critical but I feel it is a little safer this way.

Round off the blank using a spindle-roughing gouge. The outside diameter (OD) should be a little larger than the finished OD of the honey dipper to al­low for finishing cuts and sanding later.

Laying Out the Dimensions

Mark the locations of the ends of the project. Then mark where the end of the grooved section will start becoming the handle and finally, mark the loca­tion of the smallest diameter of the handle. These dimensions are not criti­cal but will provide a sight line when you start to cut into the blank. As you progress and have made a few honey dippers, these marks will probably not be necessary.

Turning the Project

Now let’s start making some wood chips fly! Reduce the OD of the grooved section to its finished size with a sharp ½” spindle roughing gouge. There are two ways to make the grooves. The first method uses a 1/16″ narrow parting tool. Leave ¼” space from mark at the head­stock end of the piece and make seven grooves ¼” apart and about ⅜” to ½” deep. Keep the bottoms of the grooves the same depth; the finished honey dip­per will look better this way. The other method uses a ¾” skew to cut the seven grooves. Use whichever tool you are the most comfortable with. Perhaps you could make your first one with a parting tool and progress to a skew as you get more familiar. The pictures taken for this article show the results from both meth­ods of cutting the grooves.

Create a rounded shape at the grooved end and follow the same curve towards the handle. Shape the handle with long flowing cuts with a spin­dle gouge, or a skew, to yield a gentle curve with its narrowest OD about two-thirds up from the end of the han­dle. You may need to place your finger behind the handle as you cut to steady the little bit of vibration you can get as you turn it down to the desired diame­ter. You can also add decorative beads, coves, and rings etc., as desired. If you want to add burned-in rings make small starter grooves with the point of a skew to guide the burning wire. I feel that decorations and embellish­ments should not get over complicated. Sometimes a simple design just looks better.

Round off both ends of the piece leav­ing a ¼” diameter joining tenon.

Sand the honey dipper with sanding cloth starting with 180 grit, or whatever grit is needed to remove your tool marks. Progress through the grit sizes to 320 grit. Do not sand too smooth; the bees­wax finish will apply better if the surface is not shiny.

Applying the Finish

Apply beeswax to the piece by rub­bing the block of wax against it, or if you are using a paste form of bees­wax, use a piece of paper towel. Use a piece of clean paper towel to melt and burnish the wax into a low lustre finish.

Completing the Honey Dipper

Reduce the tenons at the ends to about 1/16″ diameter. Do not part the piece completely off the lathe. Sometimes the little nub end will twist out and leave an annoying little hole that is not attrac­tive. Remove the honey dipper from the lathe and cut the little nub ends off with a sharp knife. I have used my skew to do this very carefully.

Rub a little sanding cloth over the ends and put on some beeswax and your honey dipper is finished. Now all that’s left is to brew up some tea and add a generous drizzle of fresh honey.