Wednesday's Wisdom For Woodturners April 12, 2023

[lew]

More nice weather! Garden rototilled and fertilized. On to replanting grass over the dog's bathroom.

 

 

Our Patriot Turners-

@Steve Krumanaker posted a cedar bowl he finished up. Beautiful colors and grain patterns!

 

Check out the comments from our turners at-

 

 

@forty_caliber is still cranking out bowls from his dryer stash. This one has some gorgeous spalting-

 

In his post, he tells us about the shape-

 

 

@Gerald mentioned he did a presentation for the Magnolia Woodturners club. He demonstrated some of the tools and methods for embellishing a turning. This video picks up at his part of the presentation-

 

 

 

Thanks, everyone for continuing to post in our thread on "What's On Your Lathe"! I think this is about where we left off last week-

 

 

What’s Coming Up-

Click on the images for links to more information and registration-

 

 

 

 

Note: The Bowl turning class will also be on June17, 2023

 

 

 

 

 

For The Newbies-

Put your spindle skills to work and turn a mixed media wine glass. Very informative video from Craft Supplies USA

 

 

Mike peace demonstrates turning small square bowls. These can be made from scraps of even several boards glued together.

 

 

 

Expand Your Horizons-

Carl Jacobson turns, carves and adds color to a vase-

 

 

I've seen this turning show up on several social media sites. Carl Jacobson explains how it is done-

 

 

We pretty much know about scroll chucks and jam chucks but do you know about a "cup chuck"? Richard Raffan demonstrates-

 

 

I'm not sure which I enjoy more- watching Alan Stratton turn objects or looking at the shop made jigs he uses. For a "jig junky" like me, it's a real treat. In this video, Alan adds Celtic Knots to Easter eggs-

 

 

 

New Turning Items-

Not new but on sale from Niles Bottle Stoppers-

 

https://nilesbottlestoppers.com/product/tenderizer-set/

 

 

Everything Else-

From Ron Brown's Newsletter-

 

Difficult Things

 

Why Is It Always So Hard The First Time You Try Something New?

 

Do you remember the first time you tried to ride that bicycle? How about roller skates, ice skates, or a skateboard? And I hope trying that hoverboard didn’t send you to the emergency room. What about parallel parking or hooking up that trailer?

 

Then there was your first time using a skew chisel, WOW! I’ll bet you didn’t even know catches that big were even possible. How about the first time you tried to get started hollowing the inside of a bowl? Did the gouge skate clear off the edge like mine did?

 

The reason is that you don’t know what you don’t know.

 

As we summon enough courage to try something new, we imagine how it is supposed to go and how we are supposed to react. It seldom goes as well or as badly as we imagined. We try again, but the second time around, we adjust from what we learned the first time. The third time it gets better and so on. When I demonstrated turning on the Woodworking Show Circuit, I would often hear the phrase “He’s done that before!”, or “I’ll bet that isn’t his first time!” I promise you, it gets better.

 

If you have the courage and persistence to try and try again, you eventually figure it out. The secret is taking the time to understand what went wrong so you can make the small changes necessary for success. I deal with this scenario almost daily. I find it really helps if I limit my changes to only one or two things so I can narrow down the culprit and focus on those areas.

 

As an example, if torn grain is my issue, I might change from a gouge to a scraper or a gouge with a different grind. If that doesn’t work, I might try shear scraping (holding the scraper at a 45-degree angle). You can shear scrape with both the scraper and the gouge. You just have to turn the gouge over. If that fails, I might cut from the inside out or the outside in using lighter cuts over the problem area. I’ll change up one thing before moving on to something else.

 

Imagine trying to juggle the effects of speed, feed, tool geometry, cutting angles, grain orientation, and wood hardness all at once. My advice is to control what you can and understand that some things are out of your control. Make small changes slowly until it works like you want it to. Be careful not to tweak it so much that something that used to work, doesn’t work anymore. That is something I also have to guard against. It happens all too frequently when running complicated machinery like CNCs and Lasers.

 

Rome wasn’t built in a day and you will be money ahead when you learn to make changes little by little. One day soon you will have figured it out and folks will marvel at your expertise. Zig Zigler often said, “Yard by yard it’s hard, but inch by inch it’s a cinch!” Remember that wherever you go, there you are.

 

 

Safe turning

Edited April 14, 2023 by lew

[Gerald]

Thanks for the post and tag Lew. The sound is out of sync on the video now and i can only guess to reload is the answer. May take a couple days to do that and will have a new address. My Apoligies

[lew]

Let me know and I’ll update the post 

[HandyDan]

Thanks Lew.  I will enjoy this weeks videos.

[forty_caliber]

Thanks again Lew!  I look forward to this post each week. 

 

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[lew]

@Gerald Thank You! Appreciate your heads up on the video.

 

@HandyDan  Thanks!

 

@forty_caliber  Thank You!