Tips, tricks and techniques for woodturners from the workshop of woodturner Derek Andrews. Ideas to improve your woodturning skills; links to other woodworking sites; news about woodturning; woodturning tools and supplies; inspiration for your next project.
Are you often dissatisfied with your work? Does the form please the eye from a distance? Does the surface finish hold up to close scrutiny? Is it nice to the touch? Do any natural features in the wood work well with this piece, in terms of scale and placement? Is there always something you didn't get quite right? If so, there is hope for you yet - Robert Genn says that "without displeasure there is no improvement and no progress."
Robert is a painter and blogger, and his post today, "Never satisfied", addresses the concerns of a painter who is never satisfied with his work. His comments could equally be applied to woodturning. He categorizes dissatisfaction in four ways, and provides four answers to each:
"Amateur epiphany" - being really satisfied with work is mainly the province of amateurs.
"Journeyman jading" - it's time to think again and move on.
"Workman remorse" - re-dedication, re-thinking and "back to basics" may be in order.
"Professional humility" - high standards cannot always be met and perfection is an impossible dream.
Be sure to read his blog post to learn the full context then check out the rest of his blog and maybe even sign up for his twice-weekly newsletter.
No man ever reached to excellence in any one art or
Profession without having passed through the slow and
painful process of study and preparation.
Horace
It seems fairly obvious that sharp tools are necessary to be successful at woodturning, and very often a dull tool, or at least one that is not as sharp as it should be, is the reason for bad experiences. But have you ever considered why? I would like to suggest three reasons, though there may be others that I haven't identified yet.
The most obvious is that a sharp tool will cut the wood cleaner. The wood fibers are more likely to be cleanly sliced by a keen edge than a dull one.
A sharp edge can pick up a fine cut. A section through a sharp edge looks like two surfaces coming together at a fine point which is capable of removing fine shavings. When the tool becomes dull, that fine point becomes rounded off, and can only pick up a cut that is thicker than the rounded edge.
A smaller force is needed to push a sharp tool through wood. There is an equal and opposite reaction, the rotating wood trying all the time to throw the tool backwards. A dull tool will see a larger backwards force, and will be harder to control.
Item three is perhaps the most important. A tool that is difficult to control may not cut in the direction you want it too, making it difficult to refine the shape of fine curves. If you have to push the tool forwards, you may just end up pushing it up and over the wood you are trying to cut. And if the wood succeeds in pushing the cutting edge backwards, the bevel may lift off the surface and a catch may result.
I recently came close to having what could have been a serious accident with the outrigger on my Nova 3000. As I swung the swivel arm, it came crashing to the floor. Fortunately my feet were clear, and I was wearing safety shoes, but this hefty lump of metal could have caused some serious damage if it had landed on a foot.
What had happened is that over the years the threaded rod that holds it all together had slowly screwed its way up through the casting which is fixed to the lathe, leaving very little threaded into the lever underneath. So when I loosened the lever, then swung the toolrest around, the lever dropped off, with the toolrest assembly following suit.
In future I will be checking that threaded rod regularly to make sure it is not projecting out of the top of the casting. With hindsight this is pretty obvious.
Satoshi Fujinuma is a Japanese lathe artist who took part in the International Turning Exchange 2008. In this video he talks about his work and how he finds inspiration from nature for the form, texture and colour of his works.
You are probably familiar with Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit. Now there is another wiki, one specifically for woodworkers, called wikiWOOD.
It is still very much in it's infancy, and there isn't a lot there yet, so this is a good opportunity for new editors to get involved and maybe set some benchmarks. A good place to start is the Community Portal, but woodturners may also want to join the Woodturning WikiCommunity, a collaborative group dedicated to improving WikiWOOD's coverage of woodturning and the organization of articles on the topic.
There are plenty of ways to contribute to wikiWOOD. You could jump right in and start a new article, but if you want to start small, then a simple contribution to an article like 'List of national woodturning organizations' is something that even a newcomer to both wikis and woodturning could have a go at. If you are good with a camera, then photographs are always needed.
I hope to see you over there soon. This is a great opportunity to help build a one-stop source of information about woodturning.
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.
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.
Lesya Popil, a dancer from Group Motion Dance Company, spent time in the workshop with the turners taking part in the International Turning Exchange and choreographed three dances based on their work. Following is a video of Part One, Seasprite Capering To Her Demise, based on an artwork by Sean Ohrenich.
What did you make today that made you get up and dance?
I have a couple of videos for you today, both a bit of a blast from the past. The first is Robin Wood turning bowls on a pole lathe, the second is Stuart King turning flowers on a treadle lathe.
Many woodturners are drawn to making vessels. Many make simple bowls, some make more elaborate bowls, often with decoration added by methods other than turning. Some make hollow vessels with tiny necks, others make goblets or boxes. Inspiration has been drawn from many sources including ancient art, nature and contemporary art.
The Empty Vessel is a blog by Susan Lomuto Rose about "the container as art". There you will find many stunning contemporary vessels, some from names familiar to woodturners, others from artists from many other disciplines. A great source of inspiration for woodturners, and other artists, that I would highly recommend.
Have you ever been offered some logs or a whole tree for turning, but don't know what it is? The website Discover Life might help. Although it covers all life forms, the tree guide is for woodturners.
To get started you do need a leaf, so be sure to get a sample or two, along with fruits and flowers if available. If no live samples are available check for dead ones under the canopy. Click the appropriate check boxes for leaf type, leaf shape, leaf veins, leaf edge, flower colour and seed colour, then press any of the search buttons.
A list of suggested species appears in the sidebar, and clicking on any of these will bring up a page of information about the species. This is culled from a number of sources, and the amount of information available is very variable.
This tree guide is also a good way of finding information about a species if you already know the name. Click on the Search link at the top of the page and enter either the common name or the scientific name in the search box. It will return all the information on the species from multiple sources. Some of these include Tree Canada, Canadian BioDiversity, Virginia Tech Tree Fact Sheets and the USDA Plants Database.
How important are handcrafted items in your life? This is the question that will be addressed on the Maritime Noon phone-in, tomorrow, Friday, July 13th.
In a world that's awash in mass-produced products, certain individuals still devote themselves to making things that are unique. Artisans around the Maritimes create everyday items like coffee mugs & breadboards, accessories like earrings & shawls, and fanciful objects that blend various media and defy description.
Maritime Noon is the lunch time radio show of CBC serving Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. It can be listened to live from the links on the Maritime Noon homepage, and will be archived for one week from their Phone In page. The phone in starts after the one o'clock news (Atlantic Standard Time).
I will be listening. It will be interesting to learn what my potential customers have to say.
update: (Due to special coverage of the Lord Black trial, this show was shortened to about 30 minutes and started at 1:30 or thereabouts)
The International Turning Exchange is underway at the Woodturning Center, and resident Lynne Yamaguchi is blogging the activities there. The ITE has been underway for a month now, but I only just found this blog which is a shame. There is a lot to catch upon.
I sometime use masking tape in my shop to hold things on the lathe, but the example shown in this post seems a little extreme to me, but it's certainly quicker to set up than a donut chuck, so I might give it a try. It is a rather small bowl though, so that might account for the success.
Yeah, I know. It's been a long time since my last post.
I recently got an e-mail from Philip Streeting of Woodturning Plus wondering why I hadn't posted anything here in a while. Apart from doing nothing but uninspiring work in the shop like bottle stoppers and coring bowl blanks, I have started a new blog A Somerset Family History and I'm giving SunriseTrail.ca a makeover. To make matters worse, I have just started building another garden shed. So until today I just haven't had anything worth posting here. Until this morning...
While searching YouTube for videos for my Craft Videos blog, I came across this video about decorating eggs:
I wasn't too excited about this until Eve started using an egg lathe. She used this and it's indexing head to mark out an egg ready for decorating with aniline dyes using a wax-resist technique called pysanky. This got me wondering if the same technique could be used on wood turnings? The most likely problem that I can foresee is that the hot wax (which is applied with a stylus called a kistka) will migrate along wood pores and leave a fuzzy edge. Has anyone very tried this on wood?
Most of the traditional Ukrainian designs don't do a lot for me, but on Eve's website she mentions a style called Trypillian.
The Trypillian people lived in the Ukraine 6,000 years ago. These eggs are characterized by the large motifs in earth tones.
I found some examples here that I liked, but the style was originally used on ceramics, and there are contemporary examples at trypillian.com. I can see how the spiral patterns may have been carried on in Celtic cultures.
So, some nice ideas there that might be applicable to woodturning. Right now though, I'm too busy to find out. Any takers?
One of the reasons I read blogs about other crafts is that they often have ideas and links that I can apply to my woodturning. My friend Cyndi recently posted Online Jewelry Design Tools, which includes some resources that applies to the artistic design of anything.
Formal Visual Analysis: The Elements & Principles of Composition by Jeremy Glatstein is a very concise explanation. It is worth keeping as a check-list. When looking at work by other artists, we can examine how they use each of these elements and principles in their work. When designing for ourselves, we can make sure that the final design addresses each item on the list in a sensible manner.
In any work of art, all of these elements and principles will be present, but some will be more obvious than others.
For those who want more depth to their understanding of design, Art, Design, and Visual Thinking is an entry level course, an introduction to design concepts and the idea of visual language. If you plan on using color in your work, whether by painting or just using more than one species of wood, Cyndi also mentions an earlier post of hers, Online color training and tools.
Cyndi also recommends a couple of books in her post, but I would also like to add Design!: A Lively Guide to Design Basics for Artists & Craftspeople which was recommended to me a year or so ago by Bobbi Chukran, and I find it very useful. It covers pretty much the same ground as the online course mentioned above, but has lots of examples and analysis of designs in a wide range of media.
which was recommended to me a year or so ago by