A Wood Turning Tutorial

I have said I am one of the least proprietary cats around. I spend alot of time designing my pieces always hoping they look impossible. Being completely self taught I have no rules or restrictions other than the laws of physics. Naturally I love the gratification of completing a challenge and compliments from admirers but the best part for me is answering the questions and sharing my knowledge. I love teaching.

Here is a piece I called Herringbowl. It is approximately 16 inches in diameter and made of maple, brass and black epoxy. I made the bowl as a wedding gift for a young couple.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3635/...bdbb3a8b_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3553/...21644bba_b.jpg
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3609/...f93f69d9_b.jpg

That is Really Awesome Icedog!Really superior work.On first glance,I thought it looked like a futuristic satellite dish.

Thank you Alan. I am taking care of some concert stuff as manager for SWMBO. Once I get caught up I wil post step by step photos and description of how this very cool bowl is fabricated.

Brad

that is cool.

I just got my grandfathers lathe going yesterday and made my first batch of sawdust. Think I'll start small, with a shave brush. Work my way up to something like this.

A masterful job and beautiful design. :tu

Thank you very muchly. And here's how it's done:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3454/...5185d2b1_b.jpg
First I milled a couple board miles of maple so it was all precisely the same thickness (in this bowl it was .650"). Then I ripped the stock to 2.75" wide and cut it to blocks about 9" long. These dimensions are purely incidental. It matters only that all the pieces are dimensionally uniform and the cuts are all square. The pieces are all laid out in a herringbone pattern as shown on a piece of masonite. I used yellow glue to secure them as I built the blank.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3621/...a186584c_b.jpg
You can see that I had the blocks all evenly spaced. I did that by pasting little bits of 0.09375" (3/32) brass rod on all mating surfaces. Then I stuck a scrap block on the end of all the spaces. Soo effectlively what I did was to make a mold into which I poured epoxy that I tinted black. It took alot of epoxy! Especially considering it was running out beneath the blocks. Loud cursing seemed to help speed the process. It was very important to bounce the assembly and tap it to release as much air from the epoxy as possible. Once the epoxy was uniformly across the top, I stopped fiddling with it and let the glue cure overnight.

I have to run some errands now so you folks can look at this ugly mess until I return.

Brad

Mighty fine looking bowl!
I do think you're using a lot of materials to produce 1 piece. Bit of a shame.

Wow, Brad. That's one of the coolest things I've seen in a long time. Beautiful work! Now I REALLY want to learn how to use my Great Grandfather's lathe...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zwaplat

Mighty fine looking bowl!
I do think you're using a lot of materials to produce 1 piece. Bit of a shame.

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Holy crap! Here I am trying to help people learn to make something rare and beautiful, something they might otherwise never even imagine and someone has to start whining about something they know nothing about. Don't be a drag. Wood grows on trees.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by icedog

Wood grows on trees.

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And there was I thinking wood came out of a sawmill!

Okay I'm back. Sorry for the delay.

After the epoxy has cured overnight your mold is now a big heavy chunk that must be cut into a circular blank. This is not as simple as you might think. It is important to make careful measurements with two separate objectives:

1. You want to make the blank as big as it can be and still fit on the headstock of your lathe. The distance from the center of your spindle to the bed is called "Swing over center". On the Nova DVR machine I used, the swing over center is 9". So the radius of any piece I turn on that machine must be less than 9". Very often people will just eyeball it and put a rough blank up on the lathe. It happens to fit when mounted in one position but as soon as the turner switches the motor on, the out of round chunk of wood acts like a cam and jams against the bed of the lathe. It always pays when working with big wood to make a quick mark of your center and draw a circle with a marker to follow on the band saw.

2. With this particular design and most glued up blanks, your finished piece will greatly benefit from carefully centering the pattern of the glued up assembly. The herringbone zigzag can be deceiving so what I do iscut a disc of cardboard the same size as the desired blank (this time it was 17") and move it around on the glue-up until the pattern is centered under the disk. Then, mark the center of the cardboard disk into the wood glue-up and trace the circle with a marker. Remove the disk and before cutting on the bandsaw, check the pattern for centration. Once satisfied, cut it.

The blank gets mounted to a faceplate. I use a three inch machined steel faceplate and number12 x 1.5" phillips head screws. The screws are going into what will be the top or concave side of the bowl. Here's what it looks like when you have the blank mounted andcleaned up:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3537/...f14b8c93_b.jpg
You are now cutting the outside profile and bottom of the bowl. It helps to have Basil with you in the shop.
Once it cleaned up the balance should be very good. That means you can work at 1500 RPM or higher. I usually work at or above 2000 rpm with a 5/8" bowl gauge. The quality of the cut is better but there is alot of heat generated. This is maple and hard plastic with bits of brass. The chips from this baby at two grand can and will make you bleed so it would behoove you to wear a glove on your forward hand. The brass pins come out when they get short enough and of course they are extremely sharp little darts sowear eye protection too. If you start this project with just a T-shirt, after taking one or two of those brass darts in the belly or a nipple, you'll be donning a coat or sweater for protection of your upper torso.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3660/...abc8ed2c_b.jpg
Once up to speed, this thing is like a spin balancer with a car tire mounted. It takes a while to spin down. be sure you have no loose sleeves or scarves or anything hanging off you. You can become one with your work faster than you can imagine. Notice the close proximity between the tool rest and the piece. This is the way it should always be. When you remove enough stock to widen that gap, stop the machine, move the tool rest in so it is just clear of the piece and restart the machine. Never move the tool rest while the machine is running. If that big piece of steel hits the rotating chunk of wood, the steel will win.

Break time for Braddie. I'll be back with more of the exciting world of chip production.

Very interesting stuff!I'm really enjoying this.Thanks for posting it.

Okay, back again. I am in the process of moving from the farm where we've lived for the past eight years to a more private little house a mile up the same road. I am doing it with one recycle bin and my MINI Cooper S. I fill the bin with stuff, put it in my little car and take a ride with Basil to the new crib where I unpack the bin and then I head back to repeat the cycle. We aren't officially "moving" until 4/1 but I hope to have it all out except for the couches and dressers for which I'll rent a truck and shame a buddy into carryin' the other end of stuff for an hour or two. But I digress.


I'm not going to tell you how to use a bowl gouge or how to sharpen your tools. I am assuming a certain level of expertise or madness if you are ready to attempt a project like this. However, if you have any questions, fire away. I can tap dance pretty good.

There's an old kid's joke, Q: How many sides does a circle have? A: Two, the inside and the outside. Well, that's the way with a bowl and when I turn them, I always turn the outside first. This is my method. It isn't very popular because folks like to use those expensive chucks. I rarely have any use for a chuck to hold my work. I have been doing this for a little while and my pieces have won some awards and folks seem to like my work so I will keep doing it my way. Here is the bowl with the outside completed:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3151/...250ed806_b.jpg
The coolest thing about the design is that all the lines are straight, parallel and perpendicular but when you study the piece it is all graceful curves. Anyway, the important thing in this picture is that ring in the center of the bottom. It is called a "foot". For this method of bowl turning this foot serves two important purposes. It is also very important for the design. I'll talk about the design aspect first.

The foot of course provides a stable base on whiich the bowl will rest. The foot is a ring and it can be infinitely adjusted. You can make it square from the table or it can angle in or out. The wall thickness of the ring can be adjusted from very thin to very thick. The foot can be very shallow or precariously tall. I made one bowl where the foot has been modified to actually be another bowl that basically intersects with the primary vessel. Tha may very well be the most challenging piece I've completed. But in this case the foot is square, about three inches outside diameter, about a half an inch thick and about 5/8 inch tall. It works well with the shape and size of the bowl because the scale is comfortable to observe. I often make the foot considerably taller than most would settle on. I find a relatively small diameter foot, about 1/6th the diameter of the bowl with a slightly exaggerated height provide a remarkable lightness to the appearance of the finished piece. If the proportions are right, the foot will be unseen from most typical viewing angles and the bowl will seem to be defying gravity. Here's another view of the foot:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3426/...c648b398_b.jpg
Looking at this shot will help me explain the mechanical purpose of the foot. In order for this to be a bowl, it must be hollowed out. In order to hollow it out, we have to get to the other side of the piece. The trick is to remove the partially completed bowl from the machine and be able to turn it around, hold it securely to the rotating headstock spindle and maintain the identical axis of rotation for the inside as the outside. Failure to maintain alignment of these axis' can cause the bowl to have negative portions, an undesirable feature. Okay, so the foot is now technically a mortise and will receive a tenon when we turn the bowl around. In the event you can't picture what I am saying, here's an illustration to save me a thousand words:

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</OBJECT><NOSCRIPT></NOSCRIPT> (môr'tĭs) Pronunciation Key

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1. A usually rectangular cavity in a piece of wood, stone, or other material, prepared to receive a tenon and thus form a joint.

I'm forced to break here for tonight because my eyes are being obstinate. I will resume the talk tomorrow.

Brad, that's a beautiful bowl and a great design. If they don't love it completely, I can pm my address! :D

Thanks for the tutorial.. at first I was kind of worried that there were not going to be any process pics... but this is good. I love this piece...not really my style, but that's the beauty of it.. it is a creative, "thinking out of the box" type project and that is what I love. You have presented things that people probably wouldn't have considered attempting. The real genius of a craftsman is in the special creativity they bring to a piece that makes it art... instead of a chunk of wood or metal. My 2 cents.

Awesome! It is really the most unique bowl I've ever seen and your use of the brass pins is ingenious. What gave you the idea to build it like this and will you continue to apply different stains to each peace; which by the way makes the design contrast all the more brilliant!

Hands and knees :bow

That is just really nice man , I like it a lot.

Thanks for posting this, Brad. That's a very impressive work of art and an amazingly heartfelt wedding gift.

Chris L

Wow, no step in that process wasn't impressive to look at.
Also your dog looks exactly like my friends dog(except my friends dog is a girl)
http://i263.photobucket.com/albums/i...ahmal/dogs.jpg
I couldn't find a good pic of her white chest fur, but it's a very similar shape. :p

Quote:

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Originally Posted by icedog

If you start this project with just a T-shirt, after taking one or two of those brass darts in the belly or a nipple, you'll be donning a coat or sweater for protection of your upper torso.

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I see where the red came from. That looks like a nice piece of work. I can't really tell, but it looks like the curves are all nice and even/smooth. How do you keep a nice, even, consistent curve? Some kind of depth guage? Did you have any problems with the epoxy swelling or shrinking with all the heat that was involved? Again, nice work.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by crazycliff200843

I see where the red came from. That looks like a nice piece of work. I can't really tell, but it looks like the curves are all nice and even/smooth. How do you keep a nice, even, consistent curve? Some kind of depth guage? Did you have any problems with the epoxy swelling or shrinking with all the heat that was involved? Again, nice work.

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I am betting it's all by eye and experience.

You are quite the artist Brad! It would be an insult to call you anything less!

Mark Avery

Quote:

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Originally Posted by jmueller8

Awesome! It is really the most unique bowl I've ever seen and your use of the brass pins is ingenious. What gave you the idea to build it like this and will you continue to apply different stains to each peace; which by the way makes the design contrast all the more brilliant!

Hands and knees :bow

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Thanks! The idea came from the brick floor in Philip Johnson's Glass House. Sandy, the young woman for whom this bowl was designed was working there. The maple was actually a pile of scraps left from a few hundred little cutting boards I designed and made for the grand opening Gala for the Glass House. I had a choice to come up with a way to use hundreds of little bits of clear maple, put it in the dumpster or wait until winter and throw it in my stove. Regarding the stains, I have a funny quirk that has become a sort of trademark. I put some red into every piece I make. The rest of the boards are natural. I selected the lightest board and stained it red. At first I looked at it and wondered if I screwed up but it grew on me. Sandy and Dante loved it as soon as they saw it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by crazycliff200843

I see where the red came from. That looks like a nice piece of work. I can't really tell, but it looks like the curves are all nice and even/smooth. How do you keep a nice, even, consistent curve? Some kind of depth guage? Did you have any problems with the epoxy swelling or shrinking with all the heat that was involved? Again, nice work.

---

Mark is partly correct. I have a good eye. I can stand back at look at a piece and very quickly determine an inconsistency in a radius of curvature. That however is not possible with the inside. I use only my hands. I run my entire hands over the work, one inside, one outside. I don't just use my fingertips. I use my entire hand and I can pick up any bumps or dips or radius changes. Usingboth hands simultaneously I can also determine inconsistencies in wall thickness. I think it's a thing all people can do. Try it. Close your eyes and move your hands so that your palms are say an inch apart. Open your eyes and see how you did. Try it again, this time a half inch. Try again. You'll find that you can train yourself, calibrate your hands to work with your mind instead of your eyes.

Any trouble with the epoxy and heat? Not that I noticed. The epoxy is more flexible than the maple so it actually absorbed any funny vibrations, contractions or expansions.

Oh Kanahmal, here's a bit about Basil: http://straightrazorpalace.com/finer...dog-basil.html

Thank you again for the compliments but thanks more for the interest. More than anything I hate to be boring. Now back to the lesson:

If you go back and look at the last pictures, you can see the pattern is about an eigth inch off center. Well, technically the center is about an eight inch off pattern. It didn't drive me crazy. Here's a tip I got from the late, great Julia Childs (and when I am face to face with my students I say it in a very silly Julia Childs impersonation), "Never apologize for your cooking. Most people don't know what it's supposed to taste like anyway." And this goes for any creative project. You have been working intimately with the piece for god know how long. Every little detail is a part of you. When you look at it, you look imediatley at the things you wish weren't there. When someone else looks at it, they see the entire piece. Don't do what everyone always does. When someone says, "Wow that is beautiful. You must be very pleased." Do not respond with, "Yeah, I love it, except this little bit right here where I F'd up."


Now, back to our program. This is where my method differs from those chuck users:
Once I am finished with the outside, sanded too, I remove the bowl from the lathe. I take the screws out, take it off the faceplate and set it aside. I get a chunk of poplar (I'm sure other clear, soft woods will work but II like poplar and it's cheap) about an inch and a half thick and four or five inches square and center it on the faceplate. Use the same screws to secure it as you did the bowl. This is called a wasteblock. The faceplate goes back on the machine and the wasteblock gets turned round and faced off so it's nice and flat. That, using a pair of dividers, measure the inside diameter of the bowl's foot. Transfer that measurement to the wasteblock. Then, taking your time, use a parting tool to cut away the surface of the block leaving a tenon that will fit snugly into the foot on the bowl. Test it often and if you remove too much, cut off the tenon and start again. It doesn't have to be very long. Iin fact too long and it will bottom out against the bowl which is very bad. You want the foot of the bowl to press over the tenon and rest against the flat area around the tenon.

Put a bead of thick (gap filling) cyano acrylate glue around the base of the foot. Do not get glue inside the foot, only on the flat part that contacts the table when the bowl is at rest. Spray accelerator on the area of the wasteblock where the glue is going to press. Then, very quickly, place the bowl onto the wasteblock tenon and press it hard toward the headstock. After ten seconds or so you can relax. If done right, the bowl is very secure and on the exact center of rotation it was when you cut the outside. It will look like this:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3455/...1d7b1dda_b.jpg
Look at this picture. You can see the bowl and the wasteblock (the wood that is not bowl). Understand that there is a round post on the waste block that is pressed into the foot of the bowl and the bottom of the foot is glued to the block. This will hold that bowl strong enough to turn the inside. Trust it. The wood will break long before the glue joint fails.

Next you hollow the bowl. I made the wall an eigth inch thick. I like things to feel impossibly light when folks pick them up. Here's a picture of how it looked as I cut away the inside:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3647/...5db38b29_o.jpg
There was the masonite on which I assembled the blanks. I didn't show what it was like cutting that crap away. It was Hell. Everyone's heard of MDF. That stands for Medium Density Fiberboard. Low Density Fiberboard is also know as particle board or chip board. Masonite is High Density Fiberboard. One never quite understands just how truly dense High Density is until one tries to turn it on the lathe.

Here's the anticlimactic part. Now you just cut away the inside until it approximates what you want. For me that meant too make the entire bowl one continuous radius (I guess that would have measured at about a meter). The wall was about an eigth inch thick. This bowl looks like someone sliced a piece off a big wooden ball. Interestingy, while you would think this construction of wood and thiick lines of epoxy was limber, maybe even flimsy, it wasn't. The rigidity of this thing was surprising. The epoxy is very strong , stronger than the subsrtate and the wood, while being cut very thin, changes direction constantly so there are no weak directions. It also turned much easier than a solid piece of maple would have. It went very quickly.

Once you get the inside close to what you like, sand, sand, sand. Begin with a coarse grit, 80 or 100 and with the machine at around 800 rpm, sand the inside until it is uniform. Then go down to the next grit, 100 or 120 and sand until the 80 or 100 scratches are gone. Next grit 120 or 150 and sand until the previous scratches are gone, etc until you get down to 400 grit paper. This is usually acceptable but hey, they make sandpaper down into the microns. You can sand it until 20,000 iif you'd like. Just be sure you have sanded enough with on grit before progressing. It is one of the great disappointments in life to get to 400 or 600 and believe you are just about done when you notice a scratch left behind by 100 grit paper. If that happens? Back you go to 100 grit and begin again. You will be there alot longer trying to remove a 100 grit scratch with 600 grit paper then if you just go back and begin again. My lathe lets me reverse direction of motor rotation. I fiind the sanding goes alot faster if you alternate directions with each grit paper. You should move to the other side of the machine when it rotates in reverse. The sandpaper should be held agaist the work piece on the bottom so the wood is moving away from you as you sand. It is easy to jam your fingers (or worse) when the wood is travelling toward you.

Once sanding is completed, put the tool rest in position and using a parting tool, cut the waste block away from under the bowl. Be careful, go slow and when you think you have cut away all the poplar that is was in contact with the bottom of the foot, stop the machine and try to gently pop the bowl off the tenon. Once you understand this method of bowl tuurning, you may never use a chuck again.

I finished this bowl by sanding to 400 then I took it off the lathe and buffed it with progressively finer buffing compounds and finished with pure carnauba wax and polished it to a high sheen.

Somehwere I have pictures of a cute little pedestal I made for this piece and I'll look for them. But it's not important. I hope this helps someone try something new. Any questions?

Brad

Quote:

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Originally Posted by icedog

Holy crap! Here I am trying to help people learn to make something rare and beautiful, something they might otherwise never even imagine and someone has to start whining about something they know nothing about. Don't be a drag. Wood grows on trees.

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I thought I congratulated you first. Must've been mistaken, to get this thrown at me.

I was just saying I find it a shame that a lot of good, usable material gets turned to scraps and dust. Just wishing there was a way to remove that before going to the lathe.

No need to start swearing at me.

I'll keep the rest of my remarks for myself. Even if they're positive. No stepping on anyone's toes then...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zwaplat

No need to start swearing at me.

I'll keep the rest of my remarks for myself. Even if they're positive. No stepping on anyone's toes then...

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If I were swearing at you, you'd know it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Zwaplat

I thought I congratulated you first. Must've been mistaken, to get this thrown at me.

I was just saying I find it a shame that a lot of good, usable material gets turned to scraps and dust. Just wishing there was a way to remove that before going to the lathe.

No need to start swearing at me.

I'll keep the rest of my remarks for myself. Even if they're positive. No stepping on anyone's toes then...

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:OTThe scraps and dust can be used for tinder to start a nice fire in the winter time. you can make paper out of it, put on a garden bed or put it in the compost or use it for other art projects! I don't see any waste personally.

Back to your regularly scheduled topic:D

Turning generats alot of chips. When you stand at the lathe and the chips are piling up (so deep my dog sleeps in them) you think, "Wow there's way more than a bowlful of chips in a bowl." there are gimmicks that allow you to cut multiple bowls out of a blank. The problem is that all the bowls are then the exact same thing over and over again. If one were to start with a solid chunk of a log there'd be more waste then I made here because you can't use the center part of the tree, it splits apart.

Very nice work Icedog. Kinda got me wanting to head for the workshop and make some saw dust. :tu

Didn't the brass take a tole on your gouge? I would think hitting that brass would jerk/chatter your tool on the rest which leads to some baaaad things. Not to mention having to stop to sharpen your tools all the time. I would have never thought of using black epoxy. I would have resawed and sanded down some Ebony and glued it up to the maple before I riped and crosscut it, but that would have taken a lot more time, and money. Ebony is expensive.

My bowl turning is limited and I am still learning but I have found that I can pickup thickness changes in the bowl by the pitch as the tool cuts. I can usually get it darn close before I run my hands along the inner/outer to feel for changes. I still like my fancy chuck. I will turn the outer first, take my base plate off and chuck the base. I have a thin profile parting tool, about 1/16, I will use that to part off the waste end of the base.

I have turned trunnions before for a friction fit on small things but have had mixed results. Never used the glue though. Ever tried turners tape? I have taped up a blank or two on some wasteblock instead of glue, never had it let go.

Nice bowl by the way. I cant get even close to that on my little Delta. Those Nova's are sweet lathes. I like the rotating head. You can swivel that thing around and turn a huge blank. Maybe one day...practice practice and more practice.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by cannonfodder

Didn't the brass take a tole on your gouge? I would think hitting that brass would jerk/chatter your tool on the rest which leads to some baaaad things. Not to mention having to stop to sharpen your tools all the time. I would have never thought of using black epoxy. I would have resawed and sanded down some Ebony and glued it up to the maple before I riped and crosscut it, but that would have taken a lot more time, and money. Ebony is expensive.

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Thanks!

The high speed steel gouge is much harder than brass and at 1500 rpm you never feel the brass pins hit the gouge. I think the maple did as much dulling of the tool as any of the three materials. Beside that, I stop and sharpen my tools all the time anyway. It is much easier to touch up a gouge every few minutes than to use it until it's dull and work to restore the edge.

I thought about contrasting woods to make this project. I don't like using too much rain forest stuff when our North American stuff is so readily available. Beside the environmental and cost issue of ebony, the whole idea of guing up a large blank in a herringbone pattern baffled me. I didn't think I'd be able to get decent glue joints. I couldn't figure out how to apply clamp pressure in such a complex assembly. As I was copying the pattern brom a brick floor I thought about how the floor was laid. I ran a test on a couple blocks to see if the epoxy would make a decent mortar material and it passed.

<meta http-equiv="CONTENT-TYPE" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"> <title></title> <meta name="GENERATOR" content="OpenOffice.org 2.4 (Linux)"> <style type="text/css"> <!-- @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </style> Interesting, I would have thought the brass, while softer than HSS would still make a noticeable knock when the gouge hit it. Seems like I am constantly sharpening my tools but turning stuff like Nara, Cocobolo, Ebony, Zebra etc... will take a tole very quickly. I use a one inc strip sander with a 220 aluminum oxide belt. One quick pass and they are super sharp again.


Turned a set of portafilter handles and control knobs for an friends espresso machine a week ago. Did a set in Bacote for my machine, another with tapered beads in zebra wood for another and have some very nice figured Asian satinwood that is heading for another set for someone else.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by cannonfodder

<META content="OpenOffice.org 2.4 (Linux)" name=GENERATOR> <STYLE type=text/css> <!-- @page { size: 8.5in 11in; margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } --> </STYLE> Interesting, I would have thought the brass, while softer than HSS would still make a noticeable knock when the gouge hit it. Seems like I am constantly sharpening my tools but turning stuff like Nara, Cocobolo, Ebony, Zebra etc... will take a tole very quickly. I use a one inc strip sander with a 220 aluminum oxide belt. One quick pass and they are super sharp again.


Turned a set of portafilter handles and control knobs for an friends espresso machine a week ago. Did a set in Bacote for my machine, another with tapered beads in zebra wood for another and have some very nice figured Asian satinwood that is heading for another set for someone else.

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You do very nice spindle work! I like making cutlery handles and cooking tools of cherry because is changes as it ages. With use or not, the cherry darkens and gains character. Plus it is cheaper than bocote because there's alot of it around (most of the cherry I use for turning I save from a fate in my woodstove).