HWA July meeting

Last week was the July meeting of the Hampshire wood turners association. I’ve already written a mini report for the Hampshire woodturners new website
This is not yet the official website, but I’ve been working on them to move. Since I believe that a wordpress blog is much easier to manage than their current website.
If all goes to plan they will redirect their hostname to the new site, and I can help them create content there.

However I still wanted to write up my own impressions of the meeting, and keep them separate from the ‘official’ writeup.

This month Mark Hancock came to demonstrate what he termed a ‘rocking vessel’
What this actually means is a hollow form, with no flat base. So rather than standing up in a conventional way, they roll around, or ‘rock’ to a natural resting point.

These are interesting, I’m not sure what I personally think about the particular design he showed us. I was interested in the methods that went into making it, but I don’t think I actually liked the resulting object.

The texture on the outside is probably the thing I was most interested in. However before we got to that he shaped the outside profile down from a cylinder and then hollowed it.

Having seen a number of demonstrations now, there are certain things that are getting a little old, repeated information that everyone gives. Certainly I don’t think they should stop giving it, after all I found the same information interesting the first time. But now I find I’m tuning out from certain bits of tips and advice that I’ve heard repeated often.

That said Mark had some useful points to make about the complicated terminology used in woodturning. The same things tend to get referred to in various ways by different people. Spindle turning, bowl turning, faceplate turning, end grain turning, etc etc. He pointed out that many of the terms dictate what you’re turning.
Instead he prefers to talk about all turning as one of 2 types.
Parallel grain turning, where the wood grain runs parallel to the bed bars.
And cross grain, where the grain runs at right angles to the bed bars.
The methods of holding etc etc, are a different factor, but the thing you need to understand is the direction of grain and the implication that has for tool use.

One great tip that I pricked up my ears for, regarded putting a dead centre in the headstock inside when you attach a normal chuck. His reason for this was having once attached a large heavy piece to a headstock on a Record lathe, (same make as mine but a few models higher) and when he switched it on the weight simply crushed the mostly hollow spindle. Ouch.
Repairs cost him 3 or 4 days of being unable to turn (which he did professionally) and a not insignificant sum.
By putting a dead centre in the spindle, you effectively make it a solid bar. It had not occurred to me that it would fit, but given I have one, and it is basically useless for anything else. I shall try to get into the habbit. I don’t think I’m in danger of turning anything that heavy. but better safe than sorry.

Something I noticed about this demo, as compared to last months. Was that nearly every part of it used a tool I don’t have.
Where as last months demo was mostly showing what you can achieve with simple tools and careful measurements. (Ok so they also indicated a need for a bench planer which is not a small requirement, but you could get by without)

This month though, hollowing was done with a special hollowing tool. It did make the job look easy, and he had a number of tips to provide. But I’m not about to go get myself a hollowing tool so…

One interesting tool use was to use a cabinet scraper to help get a good finish on the outside. He was able to use it freehand, and could do some final shaping with it to help him get the form he is looking for. Cabinet scrapers aren’t too expensive and can easily be sharpened on a dry grinder. It was interesting to see a tool being used without a tool rest, but I guess the point is that you’re taking very light cuts to get a better surface finish.

Then having used the hollowing tool to form coves at intervals on the outside (he could of used a spindle gouge etc, but since he had the hollower in his hand and it would do the job why not)

The result looked a little like a large honey stick thing. Like a bee hive or something.

Next he marked out parallel lines around the outside of the shape. Basically using the jaws for the chuck to give him 4 evenly spaced points, and drawing by eye along the length. Then, again by eye, drawing another 4 lines evenly spaced, each half way between the first 4.

He made a good point here, that accurate measurement was not necessary, in fact could be harmful to the overall effect. This is supposed to be an organic shape, so too much precision could make it seem machined.

Then for another fun tool, the mini arbortech. This is an attachment for an angle grinder (I’ve got an angle grinder so that’s something) It extends out and provides a mount for a smaller cutting blade which is basically 8 chainsaw teeth in a circle.
With this he could lock the vessel in place, and run the min chainsaw along the lines he had marked out, cross cutting the coves. To give the outside texture.

At this point I was wondering how you get back to a nice smooth finish, having a pretty rough cut with the arbortech. And the answer was to burn it!

Apparently it is a well known technique for treating wood, to scorch the outer layers black. This forms a hard outer surface which protects the body of the wood.

At this point another tool I don’t have, a blow torch. Mark mentioned that you need a gas that burns as hot as you can. This allow you to scorch the outer layer quickly without causing heat checking in the wood. There are various blow torch types available, and he used mapgas (at least I think that’s what he called it) it came in a yellow cylinder and he said you can get it in places like B&Q. This burns hotter than butane or propane, and whilst it is more expensive, you actually use less because it has effect quicker.

I didn’t see this bit in action, because he went outside, away from smoke detectors. He did give some sensible safety tips for if you’re doing this sort of thing. Get fireproof board to do it on. A welders glove to protect your hands, clear up any wood shavings that might catch. And do NOT use dust extractor either during or after. As there is a risk of pulling an ember into your dust extractor where upon hilarity will not ensue.

The burning process was followed up with using a stiff brush attachment on the which he held the wood against, this brushed off loose material, and gave the wood a tough sheen. Which would be good enough as a finish if you wanted.

But his last step was to use a rasp file to cut back areas that he wanted colour to take (apparently it doesn’t stick to the ebonised smooth surface)

And so he brought into action another tool I don’t have. An Airbrush attached to a compressor. HE had a duel action airbrush that let him control airflow by pressing down, and colour flow by pulling back on a little ‘joystick’ This looked pretty cool, and allowed him to layer on some colours into the groves of the surface.

Of course I cam away thinking…can I justify an arbortech? An air compressor? A funky hollowing tool? At the moment probably not. But maybe if I find other things that I could do with an air compressor, I might eventually get one. Or if I really want to get into hollow forms, a a nice hollowing tool may become a must.

Despite all the tools on show that I don’t have. I found it an interesting demonstration, and it’s always nice to see something quite different and unusual being made, to be inspired by different techniques and possibilities.

Most improved novice

At this months HWA meeting we had the AGM. And I got a bit of a surprise.

It was the AGM containing all the normal business as usual things you have to cover at an AGM. Such as approving the financial records of the previous year, voting on proposed amendments to things like subscription costs.
After this though they had a series of presentations to do. To thank those that had spent the last year supporting the club through various activities. But the first award was for ‘most improved novice’ and it was given to me!!

It’s amazing just how good I feel about being given this cup. I’ve been going to the club for a little under a year now. Which means I’ve been wood turning seriously for about a year also. It’s nice to find I’m not the only one who thinks I’ve improved.

Co-incidentally, or perhaps not. This was the first month I had been convinced to put my turnings on the main gallery table, rather than just hiding them away in the corner for some advice and critque.

The award itself:

It is perhaps a little odd that a novice award for woodturning is a metal cup. Maybe someday it should be replaced by something appropriate in wood. However that does not diminish the fact that it is a cup with my name on it! The first I’ve ever had.

I really like the sentiment behind this award. It says nothing about anyones work being better than anyone elses. The only thing that matters is how you compare to yourself 1 year ago. It also does not mean you’re no longer a novice. I, like most of the people at the club, will have a hard time ever believing myself anything but a novice.

As for placing my items on the offical gallery table. It was interesting to see a wider group of people observing and commenting on them. Most people seemed to like my trapped ebony heart. And one of the main questions was ‘what inspired you?’ It’s so important a question that it is on the form you write to put next to your pieces. And whilst my tear drop on wood piece was most clearly inspired by a piece in woodturning magazine. My trapped ebony heart is something that simply arose from an idea to try and have a turning within another.
Also whilst to me the join in the outer shell is clear as day, those that commented felt that the grain match was very good and at first were not sure how I had achieved the final result.

Of course as ever, there were FAR better peices on the gallery. And the most impressive was a wooden flower. A wooden pot with several stems coming out at angles. Each with dozens of perfect wooden leaves. Ending in flower petals, bells and stamen. Even including a little bee in one of the flowers. A truely amazing piece of craftsmanship which apparently took 3 months to achieve (I can believe it).
This picture doesn’t do it justice:

Finally, I decided it was time I step up to provide some support to the club, and it seems the best way to do that is to help with the website. I am awaiting details of how to access what’s there at the moment. And then I will look at options. I think that it might be good to do a complete overhaul, to make it easier for the club to post content. Since most are not web designers, I think the current model is not that good for them. I’m seriously considering a wordpress setup, to make it easier for anyone to add articles and pictures to the site. However I shall need to get some opinions first.

Watch this space.

Artistic aspirations…take 2

Recently I wrote about a challenge I’d been set to let go of the idea that my wood turnings should be ‘things’ with purpose, such as bottle stops, lidded boxes, bowls etc etc. And instead simply make something that looks interesting. My first attempt went ok, but it was alwasys just one of 2 ideas I’d had. The second idea was somewhat more ambitous.

The main thing I wanted to achieve was to have one colour of wood turning trapped inside a second contrasting color.
Initially I had a thought that the shape of the trapped piece should be interesting and multi-faced. So I attempted it by making a 3 sided piece, then taking that and mounting it at 90 degrees, using some specialy cut blocks to hold the uneven sides. I had originally intended to then turn it 3 sided the other way. This really did not go according to plan. It was very dificult to stay accurate and even once turning at 90 degrees to an already odd shape. The resulting lump of wood was uninspiring and not at all what I’d hoped for. Whilst it is a little frustrating to spend time on something only to discard it. I guess that is what experimentation is all about.

My second idea for the trapped piece was considerably more simple. I just took a small length of ebony, and shapped it into a shape a little like a spinning top, a point at one end, and rounded at the other.

Having made this piece I then roughed an oak log down to cylinder. I wasn’t initially sure how big I was going to make the outside profile so I left it pretty much as big as I could. With a tenon cut on each end. Then cut it in 2 about 2/3rds the way along. This allowed me to then mount each piece and hollow a recess big enough for the ebony piece to fit inside. At this point I decided that I’d make it relatively tight, such that the ebony piece would be unable to rotate on end inside. Looking back I think maybe it would of been better to cut a bigger recess. More on that later.

As is so commonly the way, at least for me, I spot things that might be a problem just that little bit too late to do much about it.
Having left the oak cylinder quite wide, and the recess now relatively small it left me with quite a large surface area that needed to fit perfectly together. I suspect that had I left much less waste wood, it would of been easier to achieve a nice tight join.

I wrapped the ebony piece in kitchen roll and inserted it into the recess ready for being sealed in. At this point I realised that any little inaccuracy of turning the recesses, would mean the interior recess might not line up that well. When I ultimately pierce through to show the ebony trapped inside, there might be a step. Again this might of been easier to gauge with less surface area to join, and possibly if I’d cut straighter edges on the recess I could have done something to help alignment… still too late now so plunging onwards…

Once it was glued and dried, I remounted on the lathe and prepared to shape the exterior profile. My vision was of a cage atop a wineglass like stem.
The first thing I did was figure out how thick I really wanted the walls of the cage. I really should of decided this before I started.
I decided 5mm might be about right. And I figured out what diameter I needed to rough down to and set to it.
This was where I really appreciated how much I’d wasted by using the whole chunk of oak because I hadn’t really fixed my sizes before I started. So whilst I was working to a plan in terms of shape, I really should of thought through the sizes too. I know, it’s obvious when you put it like that, but again, sometimes it is easier to make these descisions as you see it coming together as a real 3d object.

I shaped and finished the outside profile of my cage. Without starting to turn the stem. I didn’t want to weaken the structure and introduce wobble until I was ready. The next thing to do was use my new indexing rig to allow me to mark out even spacing around the edge for cutting through the shell.
For it’s part the indexing worked well. My newly created fixed point did the job and seemed to allow me to repeatably go to and from specific points accurately. Initially I marked out 6 slightly spiraling windows to cut through.
So then I set to work with my rotary tool and a carbide cutter.

This is where things become difficult to control. It is very easy to slip with a rotary tool and gouge accross the surface rather than in the area you’re cutting. It’s also difficult to be precise with lines. However I cut through the first window without too much trauma.

At this point I realised that my wall thickeness was still way too thick. I’d been slightly worried about going to far so was on the conservative side of 5mm thickness. And it was just way too thick, particularly for the size of window. I Realised that I needed to go thinner on the shell. Before making any more windows.

I also realised the size of window was just too narrow, given the relatively small interior space, compared to the size of the ebony piece. I wanted to let more light in, and be able to see more of what was inside. So I dropped the windows from 6 to 4 and made them nearly twice as wide.

It is very difficult to get nice clean cuts with a rotary tool. It is then very hard to sand the irregular sides of the windows. It also, became apparent that it was hard to control at the point I broke through into the inside. Whilst the ebony piece was wrapped in kitchen roll, it took some damage whilst I was working. This is not good since there is nothing I can now do to repair it. If I were to attempt this again I’d make the interior space at least 50 percent bigger and provide more wadding to protect the trapped piece.

Once I was fairly happy with the cage section I moved on to shaping the stem and base. Sadly at this point disaster struck…. I had a heavy catch at the thinnest point of the stem and it simply snapped. Oh bother. I thought. What a nuicsance.

I decided to finish off the cage section as an egg shape, and perhaps make a separate base for it to sit on. I remounted it the other way round. And rounded off what was supposed to be the bottom into what is now the top.
I then realised I did have enough wood left to make an integral stand, just a little smaller than I had intended.

Once again the finished result is as much a factor of how I compensated for mistakes as it is faithful to the original intent. I don’t necessarily see this as a bad thing.

Using an indexing ring

Back when I started wood turning, one of the first things I invested in was a 4 jaw self-centering chuck. One of the feature of the chuck is an ‘indexing ring’, which I quickly disovered is not much use to you without a fixed point to lock into the notches.

I’ve been meaning to get around to making something that I can use as a fixed point, to allow me to make proper use of the indexing ring, and this week I finally decided it was required to help me finish a piece I’m working on.

As I noted at the time, I should probably of made it before I tried to use the indexing ring ‘by-eye’ on my wine bottle coaster.

I decided to see what I could achieve with the most rapid construction idea I had. Whilst I considered some complex arrangements, I figured first just try something simple. So I cut a piece of wood the right hight to reach from the shelf beneath my lathe to the indexing ring. I also cut a small ‘foot’ section for it to be glued to with a simple join. The idea is simply to clamp the foot to the shelf holding it in position when required.

To locate in the indexing ring I took a bolt, and ground the end down to fit the holes. I drilled a hole in wooden upright. Then used a spring and a nut to provide some pressure to keep the bolt in place, but simple to pull back to locate in a different hole.

The whole assembly looks like this:

And it took about 15 minutes to make, minus the time it took the glue to dry in the joint.
I’ll find out how effective it is as I complete my next project.

Unique art or uninspired copy

Normally at this point in the month I would be blogging about my latest HWA challenge. Unfortunately however I missed this months meeting, and I was gutted about it. It would of been ok if I had made other plans and simply decided to give it a miss this month. But no, I simply forgot. It completely slipped my mind, going about my ‘normal’ Monday evening routine, until about 10.30pm when I looked across my coffee table and saw my wine bottle coaster Which I should of taken to get critiqued.

Any how, to console me from my failure to attend, Kat decided that she would set me a task for this month. Her criteria were

It must have no functional purpose
It must involved off-centre turning
and it must use at least 2 colours of wood.

That’s a pretty broad brief in some ways, and pretty vague in others. I am not an artist and normally adhere to ‘form follows function’ But what does form follow if there is no function??

I sat down with my trusty makers notebook and started sketching out some ideas, at first this was little more than shapes, whilst I groped for inspiration.
Eventually I came up with two ideas I liked. And so far I have made the first one.

I decided for this project not to take any pictures of the making process. I’m not sure why but it seemed that unlike a functional piece, as a piece of art it should evolve naturally and only be seen in its final form.

The road to making the initial idea into reality was not easy. I first made the bottom piece from a slice of spalted beach. This looked fantastic, except that it was really flaky and impossible to get a good finish. Several sections, particularly at the bottom of the ripples looked fairly bad when finished. I guess I need to learn about wood stabilising if I want to get much use out of the remaining beach that I have. It’s unlikely that the rest will be much different.

Ultimately I used a piece of oak, this particular piece came from a colleague at work who gave me a couple of branches he’d cut down at his mothers house. It had cracked quite badly, but I’m learning to live with that as a by-product of working with smaller branches that are given to me. And sometimes a crack can enhance a piece, in this case I quite like what it adds to the aesthetic, the ripples were intended to show the wood as fluid, reacting to the impact of the droplet. Having a crack run to the centre of the ripples is a nice contrast.

Originally the piece of oak was much thicker, I had intended to have a bowl like finish beneath the centre, with the offcentre section ‘floating’ But I decided this looked far too chunky, instead slicing it to be much thinner and placed on a small stand to make it all float slightly off the surface.

But here is my quandary, and the reason for the title of this blog post. Is it art? I freely confess that I was inspired by a piece I saw in January’s woodturning magazine(p38) by Martin Edwards
That piece was beautiful, showing ripples in wood and ‘droplets’ hanging off the rim. It was crafted to a much higher standard than my piece.
So what is the line between ‘inspired by’ and ‘copy of’. Many paintings are all of the same things, houses, landscapes, people etc. By that standard I’d say my piece is art. After all nobody looked at the Mona Lisa and said ‘great, another picture of a woman… Seen one, seen em’all’
However by my own ‘nonartyness’ having seen the process I went through, it feels like I just followed some simple rules. Take an idea I’ve seen, apply the guidelines provided for this project and presto.

That said my second idea is something I don’t think I’ve seen before. It’s still evolvinng in my mind and I have no idea if I even have the skill required to make it. The first attempt to make one part of it failed utterly to work out they was I imagined. And so I’m already re-working things. I guess I will see how I get on, and decided at the end if it feels any more ‘art’ like than this.