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Woodturning / Woodworking — No Comments
09
Apr 20

First bowl!

So the woodturning course I was taking was cancelled because of Covid19 before we got to the bowl turning part of the course. But I had a large variety sack of bowl blanks arrive from homeofwood.co.uk at the start of lockdown, and I’ve been wanting to try bowl turning for a while, so I read about a dozen books on bowlturning (like The Practical Woodturner and others), bingewatched about thirty hours of youtube intruction from a dozen different turners, set the pucker factor to maximum and picked out the smallest minature blank I had…

That’s a three-inch blank on a three-inch faceplate 😀 But we can still do more overkill…

Tailstock support on a three inch blank 😀 Well, first bowl, might as well do belt and braces. So I turned the tenon (and it didn’t look too bad I thought), then I took off the faceplate, chucked the blank up, realised I’d skipped a step, put the faceplate back on and turned the outside of the bowl.

I didn’t have any plan for the shape by the way, that was just something that felt right as I was doing it. Then I took off the faceplate and chucked it up and immediately found that the chuck itself was vibrating because the tenon wasn’t exactly central. A quick pass or two with the spindle gouge cured that, and then I started hollowing out the bowl with the bowl gouge and quickly discovered a few things:

  • I need a lamp in the corner of the shed pointed at the headstock. I had to jury-rig a torch to be able to see inside the bowl to see what I was doing. Daylight might help, but this was after dark here.
  • I really need to remove the tailstock to do this, it’s way too scary having your hands near a live center when worrying about catches in a bowl.
  • Being able to rotate the lathe stand in the shed would be a major bonus on any larger bowls. Happily it’s not bolted to the floor; less happily, the compressor and pillar drill would have to be moved which is awkward. Maybe I could put a shelf down at the feet of the lathe stand when I can get more plywood after the lockdown ends.
  • Bowl turning is a bit scary.

But after a while of taking small bites with the bowl gouge and then a final scraper pass, I was able to move on to sanding. Up from 120 to 400 grit, and then burnishing with a handfull of shavings – and doing that inside a bowl with just two fingers at high rpms is hilariously scary. I wanted to keep the colour light so I gave the bowl a coat of poppy seed oil (also food-safe, which is nice because I think this would make a good salt bowl).

And then a single coat of blonde shellac and I called it finished.

I’m rather pleased with that 🙂
I mean, the walls are too thick to be elegant and too uneven in thickness to be able to call the thickness a design choice, and I didn’t even get the bottom of the screw holes from the faceplate out of the rim, but for a first bowl, I’m happy with that 🙂

Now for that 11 inch by 4 inch blank in the timber storage box…

New Toys! / Shed / Tools / Woodturning / Woodworking — No Comments
08
Apr 20

Fixing Mushrooms

So after the last exploding mushroom, I tried turning the last two chunks of log into their mushrooms. And both times, it was looking soooo nice…

And then on almost the last finishing cut with the spindle or bowl gouge on the underneath of the cap, it caught and half the cap snapped right off, hitting me in the faceshield.

Well, maybe I had more hollowing out to do 😀
But I figured since these are going outdoors in the woods for the hedgehogs, maybe I can live with a rustic look, so I experimented by using some titebond to glue the pieces back together…

And after a day to let the glue cure (and no, I couldn’t get clamping so these were just rub joints), I put them back on the lathe at the lowest setting just for sanding and finishing.

And they held! I was rather surprised to be honest…
So up the grits from 120 to 320, then a coat of BLO, a topcoat of button shellac and then a polish with some beeswax under a heat gun, and…

So tomorrow I’ll cut off the tenons, drill a short mortice and glue a few inches of dowel into it and we can go plant these up in Fernhill.

...and maybe grab another log. I was thinking if we made a small bowl that it could be a natural birdbath or hedgehog drinking trough…

Oh, and my new nailgun arrived in the post as well 🙂 It even fits the air line connectors so I don’t have to go chasing round ebay looking for an adapter.

It works! Remind me never to glue my fingers together with this thing.
I can’t quite see it being used for much in the way of fine furniture (not that I make much that you could call fine without squinting till you went blind) but I can see it being useful for making quick things like jigs or very small simple things like small boxes for herb plants and the like.

I mean, being able to do a butt joint like that without trying to hold the two boards together and the nail in position and swinging a hammer – that’s kinda neat. And I do need to knock up a quick jig for my woodturning sharpening setup…

Woodturning / Woodworking — 3 Comments
05
Apr 20

Thank you Tom!

Tom Murphy was the mad eejit who got me to try woodturning first, when I was perfectly happy making stuff like boxes and tables. He’s been into it for quite a while now, and was always telling me I should try it. Though he also did the Jackie Chan end credits thing of pointing out the times it went sideways on him, and constantly scaring me into always wearing a faceshield…

First up today, I had to sharpen the lathe tools. I was lucky enough to get a cheap wolverine jig clone (which is well made to be fair) before we locked down and I found my original 80 grit gray wheel for the grinder as well, so today I put that back on where the wire wheel had been. Had to elevate the grinder as well with some oak offcuts, and then fitted the new jig.

From this:

To this:

Still hangs on the wall, which is nice.

For the record, yes, I know this is horrible for turning tools. Gray wheels just rip off way too much material, these should be 100 grit white aluminium oxide wheels at least, and preferably this should be a Sorby Pro-Edge, or a Tormek T4, or (and this is what I’m planning on because it’ll fit the shed better) a low-speed grinder with CBN wheels. But we’re in lockdown, so for now we’re in Teddy Roosevelt territory (“Do what you can, with what you have, from where you are”), okay? Cool.

So with that done, I reground (“sharpening” seems too fancy a word for what I did to them) the lathe tools.

On the upside, they’re now sharp and my bowl and spindle gouges are now midway between a factory grind and an Irish grind. Of course the spindle gouge got clamped in at an angle in the holder so that’s going to take a few sharpenings to sort out. Oh well. I also need to knock up a quick setting jig for these. The lines on the board and the scrap of wood I used to record the settings for the gouges are just temporary…

So then I cut off another chunk from that log (total yield: four pieces) and put it between centers. I tried to put it just a bit off-center to try to get a nice natural-looking mushroom this time.

Doesn’t look like much I know, but it’s enough to convince the lathe to vibrate a lot initally. Slow speed cutting to start.

Mostly I just wanted to get some mass off the piece and rough part of it down to balance things so I could speed the lathe up here. Doing this in green wood’s hard enough, this must be a fair chunk of work in dry wood…

Nice shavings at least. Thing with the offcenter turning is it feels like you’re cutting something that’s invisible – I’m constantly stopping to see where the most off-center bit is, remembering that spot on the rest and in space, then spinning up and feeling for the surface with the heel of the bevel on the gouge, then rubbing the bevel and trying to cut smoothly. And it went well enough for a while and then something blurred past my face and bounced off the far wall…

Well, poop. But maybe I can salvage what’s left, it seems in reasonable shape…

This time, there was a loud bang and some things hit me in the chest, shoulder and rattled right off the faceshield. I managed to find some of those parts…

Sharp enough to cut yourself on. I’m rather glad I had the faceshield on now. So thanks Tom, the paranoia about faceshields saved me a trip to the dentist 😀

Looks like the live center acted like a wedge and the piece just couldn’t hold. I guess that’s why you should turn these with a tenon. Well, I have two more pieces sawn up and sitting on the bench for tomorrow, so I guess I’ll do that with them. I must also see if I have anything that can record video and which I can mount up by the lathe, I’m irked I didn’t get video of today’s kablooie, it would have been fun to watch 😀

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