Chef Tusk at Quince wanted to turn a vintage Italian rolling pin into a piece to serve Tortellini.

I'm not sure how old the rolling pin is, but it has a beautiful old patina and I'd guess it's somewhere around 50-75+ year old. It's made of beech wood, which is normally much lighter in color, as you'll see.

The first step was to mark out where I was going to cut with blue tape.

Initially I was going to use the band saw, but Chef wanted to keep the top piece as a lid, so I tried to make the cut as thin as possible. This didn't work out that well and the sawing was tedious, but going slow gave me more confidence that I wouldn't ruin the piece.

 

With the top cut off I went to the shop and used the big belt sander to flatten the bottom so the pin doesn't roll around.

 

I went back and forth about a few different ways to cut the well. For the next pins I might make a jig and use a router. For this one I went the long way around and drilled a bunch of holes with a 1-1/8?" forstner bit.

 

Then the fun part of chopping away the excess with chisels.

 

A bit of smoothing with sandpaper by hand and it was time to finish the inside. The color change is really apparent and doesn't look very cohesive. I'm hesitant to use any type of wood stain because food will be served in the piece.

 

I made a few cups of espresso and boiled them down.

 

I had an unfinished beech pin to do some testing on and tried various garnet shellac / coffee / tea tests. What worked best was a combination of coffee stain, garnet shellac to seal it, more coffee, more shellac, and just many alternating coats of each until the color was about right.

Old hammer for comparison? I'm not sure what it's doing in the photo to be honest.

After the final coats it gets the beeswax/walnut oil paste wax rubbed on and then buffed off.

Mocked up on the dining table at Quince, ready for Chef's special guests.