Woodbox 23

This weekend I went to the Woodworking show at the Tacoma Dome. I picked up a new tool, a Henry Taylor 3/8″ bowl gouge, with a “irish grind” also called a “fingernail” gring among other names. The standard squared off gouge shape, is ground off with a rounded, swept back wing style grind. This allows for more edge surface area inside the bowl, and also lets you do ’shear scraping’, a technique I’ve read about.

This is the biggest, most serious tool I’ve purchased yet for my lathe-turning, and I’m quite excited by it. I’ve been wanting a bowl gouge, since that is my next step in turning, and this oppourtunity came up at the woodworking show. My wife graciously allowed me to pick this up, and I think it will be a wonderfull aquisition for my shop and for my lathe turning learning.

I also had the oppourtunity to attend a demo/class thing by Steve Russell, who does a lot of these shows. The demo was quite interesting, and it was neat to be able to see someone else make the chips fly through the air. The topic was on “Turning Green Bowls”, and he was working a piece of ash… joke in there somewhere, must resist… on the lathe. He also advocated a technique for preventing cracking of the green wood rough cut bowl by boiling them. Something I had heard tangentially, but was a little skeptical about, I mean come on, drying by soaking in boiling water? But he made a pretty good case, so maybe I’ll try it sometime when I have a few rough cut bowls done.

I think for the first sets of bowls though I’ll just let them dry normally, and let them warp into an oval. I want to see how far things like the apple warp, and what kinds of things happen. It could be quite interesting to see what happens.

– Badger