GfdhuuWoodturning is the craft of using the wood lathe with hand-held tools to cut a shape that is symmetrical around the axis of rotation.
Like the potter's wheel, the wood lathe is a simple mechanism which can generate a variety of forms.
The operator is known as a turner, and the skills needed to use the tools were traditionally known as turnery. In pre-industrial England, these skills were sufficiently difficult to be known as 'the misterie' of the turners guild.
The skills to use the tools by hand, without a fixed point of contact with the wood, distinguish woodturning and the wood lathe from the machinists lathe, or metal-working lathe.
