McNaughton Mark 8 Center Saver - Standard Size

Using ordinary turning tools to shave away the entire interior of a bowl seems like an enormous waste of good wood, particularly when the bowl blank is unusually beautiful or highly figured, and perhaps costly or otherwise hard to come by.

Kel McNaughton of New Zealand has developed a system that allows you to remove intact most of the wood from a bowl blank's interior, creating a smaller but viable bowl blank of the same wood. The McNaughton Center Saver actually allows you to create several nested bowl blanks from the original bowl blank by repeating the process, saving virtually all the wood that would otherwise have been turned to shavings that pile up around your lathe (as well as on you).

The standard system allows for an infinite range of coring sizes up to 16" in diameter for shallow cores and up to 7" deep for narrow cores, and requires a lathe powered by least a 1 HP motor.

(In addition to the standard system, a larger system is also available for lathes with at least 2 HP to handle coring sizes that range up to 18" diameter for shallow cores and up to 9" deep for narrow cores).

The system consists of a heavy duty 16" handle plus three variously curved blades and one straight blade, and a support post with a 4 pin turret.

The various curved blades mean you can choose the shape and size of each bowl that is contained within the blank. You can also cut the outside of a vessel. The system is easy to assemble, has long life HSS blades, and allows you to use your tailstock for safety.

The McNaughton Center Saver system is best suited for woodturners with at least a moderate amount of turning experience. We strongly recommend buying Mike Mahoney's excellent DVD about the McNaughton Center Saver to gain a full understanding of the operation and possibilities of this system.

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