So I thought I’d move up to a 6″ blank from the 3″ ones I’ve been practicing on so far. I had in mind as well to do some colouring work – been watching too much of woodturning Youtube I suppose. It went to plan right up until gouge touched wood for the first time, which is pretty good as these things go.
The plan was to have an ogee curve on the outside of the bowl, rising to a narrow lip and then on to a slightly wide rim with a downward sweep into a bead that the main bowl interior would cut down through. Then the outside and the rim would be stained black with bronze gilt cream in the pores to liven up the grain, and the inside would remain the natural wood colour.
It didn’t work, but you can sortof see it from here, if you squint hard enough while staring somewhere other than the screen…
I mean, the ogee is starting there. It’s just not aggressive enough on the concave portion of the cut. And the lip is twice as thick as I wanted and there’s tearout on the bead at the start of the main bowl. Problem was, after I flipped the bowl over and chucked up the recess, about twenty seconds into squaring up the face, I had a nice catch and it ripped the bowl out of the chunk jaws and flung it at the wall and it bounced back at my face. You can see the damage it did to the foot.
So after that I stuck with less aggressive cuts 🙂 But the outcome suffers for that.
The colour is also disappointing. I put on the gilt cream first, which was a mistake; should have stained it first, then sealed it (though I don’t have cellulose sealer which I might need to rectify), then done the gilt cream. But the colour of the gilt itself isn’t half bad. Like I said, I can see what I wanted to get from here, I just didn’t manage it this time. Oh well. Next time!
Just practicing at this stage. There are a few things I want to sort out in the shed like dust collection but I’m waiting on parts, and in the meantime I have some miniature blanks and a bit of practice is starting to make things a bit easier with turning (mainly because I’m not doing anything complicated).
Finally took the bait from all of Crimson guitar’s ads for isotunes and bought a set of the Pros (they’re half price at the moment because they’re now the Old Product 😀 ). Tried them in the shed tonight, have to admit, they do exactly what I wanted them to do; the air compressor can fire up at my feet and the noise doesn’t hurt my ears, and I can wear them with the faceshield easily and listen to music. Spendy by my standards – forty quid for a set of earplugs is twice what I paid for the J-29s which are the only bluetooth earbuds I own, I normally prefer wired headsets and earbuds. But these aren’t half bad.
And I also got a HSS blank that I want to make a beading&parting tool from…
A metal detector says that the tang from my diamond-point parting tool goes in about as far there as the end of that blank, and that tool length is a bit shorter than I’d like but it’s surprising how hard it is to find 300mm HSS blanks online – 200mm seems to be a standard length for making lathe tooling for metal lathes. Oh well. I also have some carbide inserts and bright mild steel bars in longer lengths coming to make some scrapers. I’ll have to laminate up some beech to make the handles, but I might use that to my advantage and cut a rectangular groove in the mating surfaces of the lamination so I don’t have to use an angle grinder to round over that square section to round for the tang.
3″x2″ blank for this evening’s practice. I tried using shorter screws in the faceplate because of how I’ve been having trouble getting rid of the screw holes in rims – this was as bad an idea as it sounds 😀 First catch and the thing ripped off the faceplate and jumped at the wall. So I swapped the jaws on the chuck for the larger size jaws and grabbed it with that.
Worked quite well. Oh, and I did something about the lighting as well…
It’s not fantastic, but I’ll get a sewing machine light or something soon and that’ll work better. It’ll do for now.
Turned a recess, cleaned up the base of that recess and added a decorative line or two on the base, and roughed out the outside shape. Then flipped it over, changed out the jaws on the chuck to the standard dovetail ones and grabbed the recess and started hollowing out the inside. Love that S-shaped rest by the way, it’s excellent for this.
Just great support when hollowing out the bowl, and when working on the outside shape as well.
That’s the LED strip clamped to the shelf for lighting the inside of the bowl there btw.
Without that, I can’t see inside the bowl when turning at night (by day it’s grand, the sunlight through the window is enough). I *know* I bought a small LED floodlight for the shed a few years ago for just such a thing, and I *know* it’s in the house with us right now, but do you think I could find it?
Need a better way to photograph these really. Did find something cheap on aliexpress for that, it should get here in a month or two 😀
Not horrible. Walls are getting thinner and more consistent, those are about 4-6mm thick throughout. Still getting toolmarks left over though. Need to work on that. And the finishing is very basic – tung oil, two coats of button shellac and then some briwax used as a friction polish. Some nice endgrain patterns there. Sycamore really is a lovely wood to turn.
Well, I’ve never clamped anything to this side of the vice before….
I couldn’t move the boxes beneath the bench out of the way because there’s nowhere for them to go, and I didn’t want to spin the piece around because I was using the nailgun and I’m not quite ready to point anything at myself that has the word “gun” in the title just yet. But this worked well enough.
It’s just scraps of pine – that base was actually a board that was in the living room for the last four years and I’d forgotten about it because it was up on top of a bookshelf. Some glue, a few brads and on we go.
Again I didn’t have brads of the right length here so glue and screws provide the holding strength and the brads just pin everything in place long enough for me to get the screws into it. The posts don’t make it up to the top of the edges this time; not all offcuts are long enough. Oh well.
It’s very rough-and-ready and I don’t think it’ll last more than a year at most, but welcome to making do in the Lock-in. It’ll be grand. I slathered it with some BLO so I’ll fill it with compost, coffee grounds, eggshells and plants tomorrow.
Did get a bit of turning in as well today.
I didn’t use the big jaws after all, I wanted to get this piece done quickly so I skipped the experimental bit and just repeated yesterday’s process.
I was a bit more aggressive with the hollowing out this time, with the result that the walls are a bit thinner than the first bowl. And it went pretty well, with almost no catches (and I could recover the one I did get), though I did find myself wondering for a good 20-30 seconds what was wrong with my scraper when cleaning up the bottom of the bowl before I realised I had the sodding thing upside down.
Sigh.
Still, turned out nice.
I like the burn line beneath the rim as well, I only put it in on a whim and it came out well.
It’s only a little thing but it’s grand for use as a salt pig. I like that urn-like shape as well, though the hollowing out with a bowl gouge and a scraper is a bit awkward. I’ve sent away for a few bits and pieces to make up my own carbide scrapers, they might help with that. But for now I’m having fun with this, and I have a few more blanks to get through, as well as an entire green log to break down and make things for Fernhill with. Maybe a bowl would work for that, it could act like a natural birdbath….
Dropped it off with some shopping to Mom&Dad who’re cocooning away at the moment. Who of course immediately picked it up bare-handed, so lots of handwashing all round required. Next time I’ll disinfect it before putting it in a box…
This is not even a little surprising, but it's getting exhausting.
A party running on the platform of "we won't do the right thing when it matters, but we promise that we will later, if you just hand us completely unearned power once again."
