The shaft is pretty much done at this point so now it is on to the handle. I have a lathe with a swivel head and learned the hard way that it is very important to check alignment between the head stock and tail stock before doing any spindle work.

I mount the white oak blank between a spur drive and a live center adjusting for maximum use of wood.

Now I turn my square blank to round. I always rough turn the whole piece at one time and put that tool away.

I have to start thinking about the ferrule now and as you can see it is quite a bit longer than what I need so I decide to use half of it.

I need to get an idea of the size I am going to need to turn down to so I measure the inside of the coupler with my calipers. As you can see by the measurement on the caliper this piece is larger than 1”. This is because it is a coupler made to join two sections of pipe together and still have room for solder to flow.

I transfer this inside measurement to another set of calipers that have seen better days but are good for using with the lathe. I first turn a small tenon about 1 ½” from the edge of the stock as my reference. Then using a parting tool I size another tenon that will receive my piece of pipe and check for size often.

I temporarily removed the stock from the tail center and checked the size with the pipe. I want it to be very snug at this time.

After remounting the stock to the tail I go ahead and turn a taper uphill to my reference tenon. I will come back later and size this better but at this point I will stop messing here and go on to shaping. My thoughts are that it is much easier to take wood off than to put it back on.