Poky things

Posted on 18. May 2015 by fuzzy

During my first year of wood turning, nobody could have tempted me with turning finials. I would have run a mile and then some. The prospect was daunting in the extreme, and seemed to forever be reserved to proper professional turners. You know, the guys who actually make a living out of turning.

As time went on, the awe diminished, and I realized that some of my designs positively called for a finial. Maybe not quite as seemingly impossible as the ones produced by Cindy Drozda, and so eventually I did give it a shot. I started out with some soft wood, pine or the like, only to realize that this is in fact not a good idea. Although it does teach you proper tool control, the reality is that the slightest wrong touch or just the uneven hardness of the timber will result in small pieces braking off your nice, sharp edges, and the result looks more comical than elegant.

Finals

I am still not quite ready to try my hand on a £10 piece of African Blackwood, but I am getting closer. The picture shows a range of my finials to date. The one on the left sits on top of the lid to the Rocky Mountain Nod, and the one to the right of that is already committed to another box, which is work in progress (this will be a winged box in pentagon shape, with a matching pentagon shaped lid, should be quite spectacular when it’s finished). The other ones are still looking for a suitable purpose, which no doubt will be found sooner or later.

It is actually quite tricky to get the shape right. Small changes in diameters or distances will upset the balance of the finial tremendously, converting something elegant into a caricature (and vice versa), and you definitely want scary sharp tools. I bought myself a 1/4″ spindle gouge, which I have given a long swept back grind, with the heel taken off completely (i.e. the underside of the tip is completely rounded), and this does the trick very nicely. Since I am not a youngster any longer, my eyes are starting to deteriorate, and especially the focussing on short distances is getting troublesome. An essential tool to overcome that is the use of magnifying glasses such as these:

head-magnifiers

Sanding is a whole different game on finials. Anything coarser than 180 grit, and you will lose your edges. In consequence, good tool control and the best possible finish off the gouge is a must. Although you can get rid of some tool marks on bigger coves or onions/beads, the fine details basically won’t allow much sanding at all.

The best advice really is: watch Cindy (and some others) on youtube and practice, practice, practice.

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Spinning away…

Posted on 7. May 2015 by fuzzy

At the last meeting of the West Midlands Wood Turners, the club secretary told me he’d been contacted by a silver smith who was in need of some turned items, and whether I’d be willing to give it a shot. Sure, I said, just send me the details.

A few days later I had the contact details, made contact, and pointed the fellow at this website, then asked him to give me a call when he was ready to talk about further details. I didn’t hear anything for the next two weeks, and I thought: maybe he didn’t like what he saw or maybe he doesn’t think I am good enough. After all, I am not a professional wood turner.

As it turns out, I was completely wrong. Paul is a silver smith, who does mostly spun work (as in metal spinning). In other words, lots of round stuff (sounds familiar, doesn’t it?).

In difference to me, he does this professionally, but at the same time he’s got some ideas he wants to pursue in his private time. So we had a really nice, long chat about possibilities, and I walked away with a copper prototype for a bottle coaster, and promised him to make a few prototype inserts from different woods, and with different finishes.

Let’s see, maybe this is going somewhere. Who knows?

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Hitting the limits

Posted on 25. April 2015 by fuzzy

As my esteemed readers will know, I don’t own a wood turning lathe. My lathe is a proper small engineering lathe for a metal workshop. It does what I am asking it to do, but it has its limitations, and I am hitting them more and more these days.

  1. The maximum diameter I can turn is 10 inches. That’s a decent size bowl or platter, but it’s by no means large. And there are plenty of designs in my head that are asking for larger pieces. My tutor says: well then scale it down. Yes, that’s an option, but you do lose impact.
  2. Fine spindle work requires high revs. For finials it’s best to go at more than 2000rpm, as high as you can really. My lathe does about 2000rpm, but it gets hot after an hour or so. It just wasn’t built for this sort of thing.
  3. The saddle and apron are getting in the way. Mind you, having a saddle with 2 T-slots has its advantages: I can very easily make myself add-on tools that can be mounted securely with 2 or more screws in these slots, such as my sanding table.
    On the other hand, when I want to do a nice pull cut on the outside of a bowl, there are places where I simply cannot get the cutting angle I want, because the tool handle collides with the saddle/apron.

All of which makes me think that I should buy a proper wood turning lathe. I have my eye on the Axminster AT1416VS or the AT1628VS. As long as I only have the small workshop I have right now, I think it will have to be the smaller one of these two, simply because otherwise I’d have to sell my engineering lathe, and that is not an option.

Well, watch this space…

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Dang!

Posted on 25. April 2015 by fuzzy

I haven’t posted much for the last month, mostly because I was very busy making things. Mostly boxes, in preparation for another round of the chairman’s challenge at the West Midlands Woodturners. The theme for this month was “a lidded box”.

OK, so what to do. Obviously most people would enter the typical thing, a more or less cylindrical box with a knob on the lid, and a very tight fit (a turner’s fit). You know, the one where you have to actually use some force to get the lid off, and it pops when it does come off.

So I thought, I am not going to do that. We need something different here. So I made several boxes, with different designs.

The first one is actually a copy from a box I found on google images, made by Fuji Seisakusho. I loved the simplicity of the form, and my copy came out well enough. Obviously I don’t have urushi lacquer, so I just used black stain and a wax finish on top. Interestingly enough, when I started polishing the wax, the remainders of the turpentine reacted with the spirit stain underneath, and my polishing  mop went all black. Need to remember that. The box and the lid were made from monkeypuzzle, and initially it looked really nice, with a branch coming through the lid. However, the monkeypuzzle wasn’t as dry as I thought it was, and by now the lid has warped badly (hence no picture), and I will have to make another lid.

Anyways, the second box was a very simple classic design and made from oak:

oak-boxIt looks a bit dull on the picture, because the lighting isn’t perfect, but it is actually a very nice little box. The cracks in the oak were filled with the usual aluminium powder and epoxy resin mixture. Classic shape, nice finish, but a bit boring, right?

 

 

 

So on to the next design:

mean-motherNow that was a lot more interesting! The shape came out of some doodling around with Helen, and the strong grain lines in the monkeypuzzle, combined with the simple geometric shapes create by intersections of circles (that’s really all it is) generates a very pleasing result.

 

 

art-deco-boxBut I still wasn’t sure whether any of these would win the competition. So I started another design. This time a small, almost egg-shaped box, suspended in air by two brass struts linking it to a frame made from cherry . That’s the box I entered into the competition.

And because this box required a lot of steps with waiting time in between, I made another one, just for fun.

I had made a nice finial from a piece of cherry sapwood, which is almost white, and combined this with a piece of sycamore, stained dark red, and a lid made from laurel burr. Again, a classic shape, but quite elegant.

red-box-with-finialRight at the end of making the lid, disaster struck: a small piece of the burr broke out and (due to its size) was not to be found. What to do? I could have tried to fix this by taping the area and then filling it with superglue. But I knew that it would probably stick out badly, so I decided instead to make a feature of it, and sanded 4 small cutaways into the edge of the lid.

As said, I entered the suspended box into the competition. It got second prize, and when you see the box, you’ll know why. It’s not perfect. And then I got told by a fellow competitor that had I entered the last box (the one with the cherry finial), I would have won the competition. Dang!

And then, to confirm this, the box with the cherry finial was selected to go on display at the club stand during the Tudor Rose competition next month. Goes to show that what I think is my best piece is not necessarily what others think. Dang indeed!

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Wax polish

Posted on 29. March 2015 by fuzzy

A while ago, I bought some micro-crystalline wax from Chestnut. It works well, and gives a very nice smooth finish, but it doesn’t go hard, and surfaces are easily scratched, and then it can be a bit of a mission getting it back to a nice finish.

So I started looking around for other waxes. Eventually I ended up buying a few ingredients and made my own wax finish. Here’s the recipe and the instructions:

Use a glass container (old jam jars are ideal, so keep them with the lids), place into a pan and fill the pan with about 1.5-2 inches of water. The jar (still empty) should just about stand on bottom of the pan. Heat up the water to boiling.

I used ounces for my weighing, but as long as the ratios are kept, any quantities will do. From a block of pure beeswax I cut 3 oz. of flakes and filled them into the jar. Flakes melt a little faster. Once this is liquefied completely, slowly add 1 oz of flakes of carnauba wax. Do this little by little, and stir until again completely liquefied. By now you will probably need to add some more water. A typical jam jar (454g size) will by now be 3 quarters full. Now get a second jar (unless you started with smaller quantities) and fill half of the liquid wax mixture into it, and put it aside. Switch the heat off, but keep the jar in the hot water.

The final ingredient is pure gum turpentine. Yes, the stuff that’s made from resin. Do NOT use any of the replacement products, they won’t work. Plus they smell awful compared to the real thing. Measure 3 ounces of that and stir slowly into the wax mixture. Then lift the jar out of the water and let it cool. As the wax sets, it changes colour from the orange liquid into a light yellow paste which looks a bit like honey.

Now put the other jar into the hot water, heat up the mixture until completely liquid, and measure and add 3 ounces of turpentine to that, stir, and let it cool. You now have two jars full of really nice wax finish.

You can play around with the quantities, to achieve slightly different results:

  • More carnauba wax will make the resulting polish harder, and you can achieve a glossier finish. In order to keep the polish in the jar at a usable level of hardness, you will have to also add more turpentine, probably about double to triple the amount of additional carnauba wax.
  • More turpentine will make the mixture more pliable, i.e. it will be easier to get it out of the jar. However, this will then also result in a finish that needs more time before you can buff it. Essentially what happens when you put the wax polish on a piece of wood, is that the turpentine will vaporize, and leave behind the wax components. More turpentine = more time for vaporization.
  • You can also add colour at this stage. Liming wax is created in this manner, but all sorts of colours are possible. Especially well work the spirit based stains from Chestnut.

 

 

 

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