I spent a bunch of time this weekend at my friend Dan’s. He has a wood lathe and is pretty accomplished with it. A few months ago, the conversation turned to woodworking and nose cones and balsa. Though he had no experience with balsa and its very low density, he was willing to give it a try. That left me free to design a pretty odd fantasy nose cone: a bed knob. Thus, the inspiration for the current project.

It happened that I had a nice piece of balsa in my parts bin: certainly much bigger than we needed (10 cm diameter cylinder, about 30 cm long; we needed all the length, but a 7 or 8 cm diameter would have sufficed). Despite a few interesting challenges, like when the piece let go (i.e., broke) at a thin spot that required repairing and then some reworking, Dan produced a very cool piece. It looks just like a turned bed knob!

Much of the rest of the construction is complete; more on that later.