Kitchen Tools - Stainless handles and rods for drink stirring rods/swizzle sticks.

[Paul Jones]

This is another part to my "Kitchen Tool" series for stainless steel tools I made for my wife and friends.

The following photos include all new stainless handles for drink stirring rods/swizzle sticks. I made a series of 16 handles for the stirring rods using 3/8" diameter 303 stainless steel rod. The 3/8" diameter stainless steel rods were reduced to 0.364 diameter before knurling the 21 pitch knurl (by the way I used the Android app Kurling Calculator to calculate the pre-knurling diameter).

Dimensions to the stirring rod.



Plans and examples of the 303 stainless steel stirring rods.



Kurling the 21 pitch into the 0.364 diameter 303 stainless steel rods



Machining 0.052" wide grooves into the stainless steel handles. The 0.052" grooves were machined with a right-hand Nikcole Mini-systems tool holder and carbide inserts (must engage the stainless steel rod slowly or the Nikcole carbide insert will chip). Also, AR Warner makes the equivalent T15 inserts for this type of tool holder and I have used these with success and the Ti5 is not as fragile as the carbide inserts.



The separate ball-ends of the stirring rods were created with a custom ground HSS form cutting tool, balls filed to finished sized, polished, drilled for a press fit and glued with Loctite 620 (high temp formula for 450 degrees F), rod reversed and ball re-mounted back in the lathe collet and finally finished on the bottom-end. There is no easy way around this.



Thank you for looking,

Paul Jones