Woodbox 23

I am SO looking forward to this book. I’ve conversed a bit with Robin over email and he is a very nice and helpful guy. This book is something that has been needed for quite some time, and I can’t wait for it arrive. I would highly suggest anyone with any interest in the period woodturning picking this up. Robin is one of the worlds foremost period woodturners, and he is keeping a tradition and craft alive in a time of moderization on and progress. Lets not lose our history.

– Badger

The Woodturning Resource forum is back after a brief Hiatus (Remember to update you Bookmarks!) and as always interesting stuff is being posted.

Here are the plans for making a three layer, inside out Xmas Ornament. I’ve always been a little curious as to how they did that. Now I know!
Click here to download the Word DOC file with full detailed instructions and lots of pictures. Well done indeed!

– Badger

A nice little tip from the wood workings tips blog…

Woodworking Tip: Glue Clean-Up Tips

and yes, I’m back from my little vacation. I hope to get some logs cut into blanks this week, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to spare the time from preparing for my class on Medieval Banners and Standards to do so. I teach the class next weekend, and I need to generate an entire new outline, and hand out.

– badger

Chopsticks and a rice bowl from teknatool.com

I found a pretty interesting set of plans (more like vague guided steps actually) for how to make your own set of chop sticks and rice bowl. Doesn’t have a lot of detail, but it does kind of inspire me to think about making one of these. I’ll post pictures of mine when I get them done, after I get some of that elusive free time I keep talking about.

My intent is to (after a couple of weeks from now) build a cutting block for logs, cut some bowl blanks out of the Apple wood logs I got, and rough a bunch out. I have that new bowl gouge to play with and no time to play with it.

– Badger

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