About

The club was formed in 1990, the membership coming predominantly from the old Project Supplies woodturning club which folded when the company ceased operating. The new name became the South and West Wales Woodturning club, because at that time there were no other woodturning clubs in the area. The first home of the club became the stables of the Cross community centre in Pontardawe.

One of the limitations of the venue was that the two second hand lathes that the club had purchased needed to be assembled and disassembled at the end of each meeting. Following the decision by the local authority (which was taken in mid 2004) to turn the stables over to another organisation with a change of use we had to look for a new venue. At the same time the club undertook an exhaustive questionnaire/survey of club members over all aspects of the club, meeting days, lathes, equipment, demonstrations, trips etc. The results helped point a way forward.

We were very fortunate to be able to find the community centre at Dyffryn road, Alltwen to become our new venue. We moved to the new venue in February 2005. The community centre is an old school and we were able to obtain exclusive use of a classroom to store our lathes and equipment, and subsequently use of another room for meetings on club nights and occasional demonstrations.

During 2005 we applied for, and eventually obtained a lottery grant of £5000 dependent on the club providing £2358 from club funds. The money went toward the purchase of new lathes ,chucks, tools and dust extraction equipment. In order to achieve this it was necessary to amend our constitution. The original constitution of the club was accepted at the AGM in 1992. The amended and current constitution was agreed at an EGM on July 25th 2005.

Following an electrical survey of the building by the council in 2009, the committee felt there was an opportunity to improve the safety of the woodturning room electrical supplies by moving to overhead supplies thereby reducing tripping hazards. Funded by £500 of club funds and the rest paid for by the community council,the work was undertaken at the beginning of 2010, and the same year the club contributed time and effort to the redecoration of the centre.

In 2015 we became an associate member of the Assocoiation of Woodturners of Great Britain, and now have our insurance through their insurers.
We have a good working arrangement with the clerk of Alltwen community council and the caretaker and believe the facilities are now ideal for our needs.