Way back in the mid 1960s, when I was at school, I had two experiences of woodturning.
The first we won’t mention. I wanted to make a footstool for my piano teacher (who taught lots of short people), and I needed four legs. The teacher pointed me to the lathe and told me to get on with it. What a waste!
A couple of years later we had a new woodwork teacher, and he presented me with a 6 inch square piece of rosewood, two inches thick, and took me through the stages of mounting it on the lathe and turning a bowl.
It would have been heavily depracated these days – we used metal files which had their faces ground flat and a sharp ‘scraper’ end ground on. The metal is very brittle and full of internal stresses. It breaks easily if you have a catch, and with all its stresses if shatters like a grenade, firing shrapnel in all directions. But this was the ’60s!