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Expensive sawdust, working out the lathe and turning brushes
I have been playing with the lathe getting in some practice on some less expensive wood, cherry, walnut, moved up to some Bocote and Cocobolo, turned a little tulip wood. Tonight I chucked up a 13 inch long hunk of burl. You have to have sharp tools, I had to give my gouges and skew chisel a retouch and you have to go slow otherwise you will chunk out the burl. It sure makes some nice shavings, that is some expensive gerbil bedding.
I have also been working on finishes trying to find something that will hold up the abuses of shaving. Epoxy resin is not viable due to the cure time. the pieces would have to be constantly turning at very low RPM’s for 24 hours while the resin set up. Varnish an urethane is not cutting it, turners finish is a wax base and relys on friction but if you soak your brush in hot water, there goes your wax. I have settled on a semi gloss boat finish. Since it is a boat finish it is designed to stand up to wet environment but still takes 24 hours to dry but it can be applied and the work piece set aside to dry then recoated a day later.
At any rate, I put together 5 sets of scales this evening and then went at the lathe turning a string of burl handles, a black palm handle and a mystery wood handle. The mystery wood has some striking grain so I picked it up out of the ‘by the pound’ box at the wood shop. I decided to try something new on that one. There is only so much you can do to a brush; after all, it is a handle. I turned it down to a cylinder and stood there staring at it trying to decide what I could do to make it different and maximize the stock and grain. I decided to try turning a brush with no hard edges, all flowing lines and tight curves. To make it more interesting, I made it larger than normal and cut 3 finger grooves in the handle. I think it came out quite nice.