Basic Violin Tuning Peg

i've been wanting to learn woodworking on a lathe. I had a good interest in music so decided to turn out a violin tuning peg.

its made entirely out of wood with no other materials. as for tools all I used was, a lathe, a band saw, wood chisels/turning tools and a belt sander.

starting with a wood dowel and cutting it down to vage size to get it down to fit in the lathe.(the exact size of the dowel doesn't matter as you will be turning it down to a specific size.

now get it into the lathe and set up the lathe in the manor to how you intend to turn the wood. after that turn the wood to remove the outer skin and get the wood round.

while accounting for the amount of material in the jaws (this will become the handle of the tuning peg). turn down one spot to the smallest dimension( 0.22in) and one part to the biggest dimension (0.30in) with a total length of 2.5 in.

once you get the rough dimensions with the smallest and largest dimensions then you can begin to turn it down to a taper (this process may be hard especially if you haven't done it before I would recommend staring a smaller project just to get making a specific geometric feature comfortable or if a part fails turn it into something else I made a golf tee because I made a part too small). the exact taper angle doesn't really matter. just so long as it's smooth.

after getting the taper smooth measure the head and draw two lines about where the head stops and the peg starts. using a belt sander (or hand sander/file) reduces down to those lines. then round the head to a circular shape as opposed to a rectangle shaped handle.

this step is a little tricky. you put your tuning peg into the head of your instrument. then measure were you want the string to be. mark this spot. using this spot drill a hole with a 3/32 bit. (the exact bit doesn't matter as so long as its in the range it will work. ) then the only thing left to do is tune up and play.