With the cold temperatures and the high winds whipping around the shop door the past few days it wasn’t very enjoyable to do much out in the shop. I don’t really think it was much colder than at other times throughout the winter but the howl of the wind made it seem that much more so.

However, I was able to get out there for a few hours and turn a small bowl out of walnut. The bowl is 5″ in diameter and 1 3/4″ tall with straight sides and a shallow curved bottom:

I found the walnut fairly easy to turn, in fact, quite enjoyable. It finished up well too. Walnut always finishes with a look of elegance, as confirmed by even my limited turning skills.

Here’s a sequence of photos showing the steps I took to create this bowl.

Continue reading 'Walnut Bowl From The Whipping Wind'

We had another great presentation from master woodturner Don Moore at this month’s Nova Woodturner’s Guild meeting. His talk was on cutting bowl blanks from logs. He shared his experiences with tips, anecdotes and his usual light-hearted humor and banter.

I mentioned in a past post about Don that he owns, and lives on, a 450 acre woodlot. This has given him the opportunity to farm and cultivate his own wood ‘from the ground up’ and the experience needed to create quality wood for woodturning.

Continue reading 'From The Forest To The Lathe'

1. If you resaw wood, keep a bandsaw blade strictly for this purpose. Cutting curves knocks down the set of the blade’s teeth which will cause a blade to wander.

2. Most boards display rift grain at the edges and plain grain in the middle. To cut legs for a project that displays straight riftsawn pattern on all four faces cut your legs from the edges of your boards. You will get legs with four good faces and look good from any angle.

3. When preparing laminates make the bottom board wider than the others, with one long edge machined straight and square. During glue-up have the squared edge proud of the rest of the stack. Once glue has dried you can use this edge against your tablesaw fence to square the other side.

4. Compact discs make excellent shims for setting up dado blades. Simply enlarge the hole to your tablesaw’s arbor size, and insert the discs between the blades to the required thickness you need.

5. Some woods are more prone to tearout and require an extra step when cutting, especially plywood. Run a strip of masking tape down the length of your wood; mark your cutline directly on the tape. Saw and remove tape. It should be tearout free.

These are just a few tips that I picked up over this past week. They come from a variety of sources including books, magazines, newsletters, online and some from personal experience.

There are more Woodworking Tips and Tidbits located here.

Back to the shop…

From time to time I come across some cool woodworking related videos. Some of them are instructional, some are humorous, some are just cool. I’m going to start posting them here on Woodworker’s Guide in a new category called ‘Cool Videos’.

Here is the first one. It’s a cute little animated story of a piece of scrap wood hoping someday to be something more. It’s called Seggy’s Dream:

Btw – The vase in the story sold on eBay as a fundraiser for the American Cancer Society for $5600.00

Back to the shop…