By the sweat of your brow …

Posted on 28. February 2016 by fuzzy

… you shall learn from your mistakes. I know, that’s not quite what it says in the bible, but it’s much more appropriate here.

I have not had much luck lately with my endeavours. I turned a goblet for a club competition, and when I was down to about 1mm wall thickness, and ready to just give it the final cut, it just exploded on me. I couldn’t even find all the pieces afterwards.

I turned some blanks, only to have several of them develop some serious cracks. Not sure I can use them for anything.

Then I started playing around with a new vase form, with some cutting away of the rim. One of them (the prototype) came out all right, but needs more work in other areas. On the second one the overhanging rim bit just snapped off. I am now trying to glue it back into place, but most likely that will then prevent the colouring as I wanted it.

Then I went through the bottom of a bowl using my bowl saver. That was a first for me.

And now this:

IMAG0061

I turned this platter from a nice piece of rippled sycamore. There was a crack, but I had it filled with glue. Or so I thought. When I applied the stain for the rim, it soaked right into the crack and that essentially ruined the piece. So I decided to cut that whole section out and make it into a feature, by inserting a piece of purple heart.

IMAG0062As it turns out, that is almost impossible. Even with sharpened and honed carving chisels it is night on impossible to get a really nice clean cut against the grain, and in consequence the joints between the insert and the dish just look bad. So unless I now cut more off and think of a different way of inserting a piece, this is very nicely coloured firewood.

I suppose this is all part of the learning curve. But it still hurts.

Posted in Musings | Leave a comment

First!

Posted on 27. February 2016 by fuzzy

Yesterday I shipped my first commission! Yeah! Yippieh!

OK, it’s not a terribly big one. I was asked to make 16 pins with button heads for antique musical instruments. The originals were made from ivory, clearly not an option any longer. So after some chatting with the customer, I decided on bone rods. I actually got the inquiry way back in December, but I couldn’t make contact with the supplier of the bone rods until about 2 weeks ago.

As it turns out, bone is actually not a bad material to work with. It doesn’t cut like wood, but it scrapes very nicely. Sharp scrapers and you get an nice surface right off the tool. Only needs sanding with 320/400/600 grit and you have a very nicely polished surface. The one thing that was a bit of a surprise is the range of colours displayed. The outside of the bone rods is milky white, and that’s because they have been bleached to death. Which is actually good thing, as otherwise they would smell. And I mean stink.

But once you get through that layer, the colours can be anything from white through to almost orange, with the best bits showing a translucent quality, almost like mother of pearl, except there’s no iridescence.

Well, it’s all done now, and I still have some bone rods left. Anybody else interested in some button pins?

It all came to about £64. Not huge, I know, but you’ve got to start somewhere, right?

The best thing is, I’ve got the next two commission already lined up, and they are bigger. Things are rolling, my friends. Watch this space.

Posted in Turning | Leave a comment

News

Posted on 14. February 2016 by fuzzy

I know I haven’t posted for a while. To be honest, I got really busy at work, and also in the workshop. Now that it’s been decided that we (my wife Helen and me both) will do a number of events this year (I’ll post a separate event list), I really have to get my skates on and make some stock.

So, loads of rough turning. Right now I have around 30 rough turned pieces of all sorts somewhere in the house. And at least half a dozen in various stages of finishing. Generally finishing is not my strong side. I will have to make an extra effort one day to just complete some of my turnings. It’s only really a bit of varnish here and some wax there, that sort of thing. It’s almost like I lose interest once the finishing line is in sight, and move on to the next exciting thing. Bad habit, I know.

I have also had quite a bit of bad luck recently with some pieces. For the next club competition the subject is “goblet with lid and finial”. I had just the right wood for this, a nice piece of yew. Got the inside of the goblet nicely finished, and started turning the outside. Once last final cut (wall strength was down to about 1mm already) and big badaboom, the whole thing went in pieces all over the workshop. I am still not quite sure what exactly happened, maybe I hit a knot a little too hard.

And now I have a hollow form that was actually looking very promising, but it’s now developing cracks and they are getting bigger all the time.  As I was planning some carving on it, I left the walls quite thick, and that may well be the saving grace. The only problem will be that in order to achieve the look I wanted, I’ll have to fill the gaps with some kind of glue and that then puts dyes out of the question. We’ll see.

The good news is that I am now getting quite good at rough turning bowls. 10″ blank, with only the corners cut off, rough outside, and 30 minutes later we have a decent bowl about 1″ thick and in a nice shape.

I’ve also had some luck regarding tools. John BHT put a post on the AWGB forum about some tools for sale and I managed to get in quite early and got some really nice stuff. I ended up spending over £600, but at the same time probably saved about the same amount. Now I have a Tormek 2000 grinding station with all the bits, and a Kel McNaughton bowl saver. I just have to figure out how to use it.

This is where my tree surgeon comes into the picture, again. Yesterday he left two substantial pieces of cherry on my doorstep, with a little note. These pieces are about 5″ thick and will easily yield a 16″ bowl each. The note says “Can you please get me a price for two bowls”. Well, that’s a bit of a predicament. Ordinarily I would charge about £160 for a bowl of that size. But Mark is a friend and a very good source of all sorts of interesting wood. So we came to a different arrangement: £100 for two bowls, and next time I come to his place, I can load my boot full to the rim with whatever wood he has in his shed, free of charge. I reckon he’s still getting a very good deal. But then, the things you do for a friend.

I think that’s all of the news for now. See ya.

Posted in General | Leave a comment

Feedback, please?

Posted on 28. January 2016 by fuzzy

I happen to know that there are actually a few people out there who read this blog on the odd occasion, so my efforts are not completely wasted. However, despite the fact that comments are enabled (albeit with moderation), all I ever get in my comment queue is loads of spam.

A regular favourite are people telling my that my site could go viral, if only I were to spend $50 on their fabulous traffic generation tool. And there’s the guys (and girls, if you believe it) with plenty of contacts to sexy russian/thai/chinese/(insert your favourite nationality here) babes. Having said that, most of them actually use the contact form.

And there’s the usual mixture of penis enlargements (thanks, but no, thanks), viagra pills, lingerie, insurances, and so on and on.

What I don’t get is any actual real feedback from real people talking about the actual articles or items. So here’s my request to all the actually interested readers of this blog: Why don’t you muster all your courage and post some meaningful, relevant, related and above all, genuine comments? That’d be real nice, thank you.

Posted in General | 1 Comment

Joy and pain

Posted on 27. January 2016 by fuzzy

This website runs on my own server. That’s not your usual setup for most people, but considering I actually earn my money doing IT for other people. it shouldn’t be a big surprise, either. It is, in fact, a Linux server (debian, to be precise), and heavily secured. Every day there are hundreds of idiots trying to break into the server itself or one of its websites. As far as I can tell, none of them actually ever get anywhere at all, but it’s like the sea: the waves just keep on crashing with neither rhyme nor reason.

The very same server also runs a mail service for most of my domains, and a handful of other websites. All of this information is in the public domain, and any half-decent web guy can figure it out within a few minutes, so I am not actually spilling any beans here.

This website uses WordPress, one of the best blogging and content management tools available for free. There are thousands of plugins available for just about any purpose under the sun and then some, and there are also hundreds of themes (aka skins) available, most of them for free, making this one of the great success stories on the open source community.

Why am I mentioning all of this? I am writing about it because it is at once a great joy and a big pain in the arse. The great joy is that I can do with this server what I like. If I were to have my sites hosted on some cloud service, I would not have that freedom. I would have to share WordPress with hundreds of other blogs, and could only use the themes and plugins made available by the owners of the server. I would not be able to analyze my logs to death, and I would most certainly not be able to get anywhere near the actual operating system itself. On this, my own server, however, I am god (did I mention that I am an atheist?).

There is a price to pay for this elevation, though. It comes in the mundane, weekly or daily maintenance that has to be done.Log files need analysing. Updates need installing. Sometimes they break things, and then I can spend hours fixing them or searching the interweb for solutions. And there was a steep learning curve, now a distant memory, but it had to be mastered. And every couple of years I need to buy new hardware.

So, as you can see, even a god needs to do housekeeping. That’s actually quite inspiring, if you think about it. Of course, you’d have to be an atheist first, otherwise this is all quite blasphemous.

Posted in Musings | Leave a comment