INDEX

Last updated June 14, 2009

Woodturning technique

• Remounting dried bowl blanks
• Marking dark wood
• Getting started in woodturning
• Sanding advice
• Grain raising
  

Materials

• What's that tree?
• Some low-tech approaches to drying wood
• Box lids and wood movement
• A step back in time
• A splash of color
• Hardening spalted wood
• Turning ancient wood
• Tight fitting wine corks
• Treat your Cherry to a sun tan
• Cutting large pieces of wood
• Splitting large logs
  

Tools and Equipment

• Where's the remote?
• Sharp tools and lathe maintenance
• Building my lathe bench
• Zero clearance bandsaw throat
• Bowl blank templates
• Table saws are dangerous
• Pole lathe photos
• Danger around every corner
• Spare wheels for the Beall buffing system
• Specialty bowl-gouge grinds
• Chuck maintenance
• Why are sharp tools important?
• Nova Outrigger Hazard
  

Woodturning Videos

• Turning a honey dipper
• Wood sculpture interpreted
• Blast from the past
• Pysanky and Trypillian decoration
• What would you like to see on video?
• Woodturning on YouTube
  

Projects

• Turning a honey dipper
• Blast from the past

Woodturners

• Interview on Layers Upon Layers
• River of Destiny - The Art of Binh Pho
• Transforming Vision: William Hunter
• Pfeifer and Flynn on collaboration
• Ornamental turning - Joshua Salesin
• Art in Motion - Siegfried Schreiber
• WOODTURNING NEWS: Liam Flynn
• Mathematics or art? - Elias Wakan
• WOODTURNING NEWS: Michael Hosaluk
• Michael Hosaluk finalist for 2005 Saidye Bronfman Award
• Woodturner of the month!
• Inspiration from nature: Satoshi Fujinuma
  

Woodturning Community

• ITE 2007
• AAW Symposium 2007
• Woodturning Plus
• Wood 2007 - exhibition
• Pens for Canadian Peacekeepers
• Extreme sharpening
• ITE winds up (2006)
• Gibsons Landing Fibre Arts Festival
• International Turning Exchange gets blogged
• South Africa 2006 Conference
• ASU exhibition
• More woodturning blogs
• Turned Wood - Small Treasures 2006
• Potter's Marks
• WikiProject: Woodworking
• wikiWOOD
  

Art & Design

• Wood sculpture interpreted
• The Empty Vessel
• Pysanky and Trypillian decoration
• Design resources
• Repetition as a design element
• Woodturning Plus
• DiscussingThe Art of Woodturning
• Inspiration for woodturners
• On self-imposed rules
• Performance Art
• The Creativity Portal
• Who influences your work?
• Stair Spindles
• Inspiration from nature: Satoshi Fujinuma

History

• Blast from the past
• A step back in time
• The Abbot's Chair
  

Remounting dried bowl blanks

Six months ago you started off with a green log and roughed out a bowl blank and left it to dry. It is now a cupped oval shape, and you need some method to secure it on the lathe for final turning. Any spigots or recesses you left are now oval too. If you used a coring system, there are probably no spigots or recesses anyway:-


There are many options available, and will depend to some extent on what equipment you have available, the size of the bowl, and of course your personal preference. Today I'm going to show you the approach I took recently while preparing 100+ bowl blanks for final turning.

Ultimately I want to be able to mount the bowl on a chuck, gripping inside the rim, with no tailstock support. This way I can turn the outside of the bowl without having to make awkward cuts to work around the tailstock. So what I want is a trued-up recess just inside the rim that I can grip with cole jaws. Here is a picture showing how I cut this recess with a square scraper. I also make a slight dovetail cut with a spindle gouge.

I have the bowl blank sandwiched between the chuck and tailstock. I am using just two large Nova Power Grip jaws to drive the bowl, but they aren't really holding the bowl, just supporting it and driving it. The corners of each jaw press into the outside surface of the bowl blank. These four points provide a very stable platform for the blank. I use just two jaws so that the oval blank sits nicely between them. I align the bowl so that the jaws are 'gripping' across the short axis of the oval. This way there is no way the bowl can turn and come loose.


This larger bowl needed a block of wood (a reject candle holder; I new I would find a use for it one day) between the bowl and the tailstock.

In a later post I will show how I turn the outside of the bowl by mounting them on my cole jaws fitted with customised wooden jaws.

Turning a honey dipper

Here is a video showing Finnish turner Antti Sorvamaa turning a honey dipper. This is a nice project for beginners who have already learnt to use the basic spindle tools. Don't forget that Antti has probably made quite a few of these before, so don't expect to be able to work nearly as fast as he does. Choose straight grained wood, free of knots and figure, and something not to hard. I suspect that he is using moderately dry birch rather than something like dry rock maple.