Wood Witch

So in the spirit of “things you see on youtube are occassionally correct”…

That’s BB Turning, a Dubliner transplanted to Killorglin who does a lovely line in bowls and lamps down there, along with some youtube videos with a nice familiar accent (for some reason, despite a woodturning community which is massive, well-organised and world-class in talent, there are very very few Irish woodturning channels that I’ve found so far and only three woodworking ones, it’s a bit sad). But that was a nice project and since these raw snowmen just arrived in from the Carpentry Store this week…

So I put one between centers, roughed it out to round with Calum’s help, put a tenon on either end and split it in half (each of those blanks should be two snowmen.… Read the rest

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TortoiseShack

So there’s a podcast I listen to here in Ireland called TortoiseShack (I guess they’re more a channel than a single podcast these days, they’ve spun up dedicated special-interest podcasts), which has a lot of voices we don’t get to hear on RTE much. Longer chats with data protection experts like Simon McGarr (which is how I got interested in them), talks on green politics with people who know why you can’t have a forest of walnut trees, discussions on the homeless crisis with Peter McVerry, that sort of thing.

I’ve been throwing the price of a cup of coffee at them for a while now on patreon, but I was reading how one of the two guys who does the podcast is running 2,020 miles this year for charity (he finishes next week) and I had the idea to make them a desk ornament because if you look at their logo, it’s almost like it was designed to be made as small bits on the lathe and joined together:

I figured, the head is just an egg, the legs and neck are just slightly curved cylinders, the tail is just a cone, and the top and bottom shells are just unhollowed bowls.… Read the rest

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