The June meeting had a flurry of activity. It was a “round robin” demonstration night. In all there were five quick demonstrations of various tools or skills that applied to woodturning. These types of meetings are really informative and help keep the attention of the membership, at least in my opinion.
Taylor Ledden started off the evening with a demo on a tool called the “Easy Rougher”. It is a shear scraper that has replaceable inserts. It is similar to the concept of how a machine lathe tool functions. When the tool is dull, you reposition or replace the cutter.
John Ellis demonstrated his method of putting spiral carvings into his turning. It’s easy to show than to write about, so I won’t bore you with the details. Maybe I’ll try to make some sketches of what his approach is.
Gilles Belanger’s demonstration was about the usefulness of waste blocks or glue blocks. There are two distinct advantages to waste blocks. The first is if the blank that you are working is thin, then you can add material to the blank and have some thing that a chuck can hold. The second is that with the waste block, you can turn the shape into the bowl without having to truncate a curve. In other words, you can overextend the flow of a curve and not have to worry about where it stops until you want to put the foot on the bowl.
Archie DeGaust wielded the might skew chisel for his demonstration. He showed how to use a skew as another means of roughing a spindle. He was so quick at it that he actually can rough with it faster than a roughing gouge. He also showed the basic features that can be cut with the skew and how not to be afraid of it.
Les Morgan ended the evening with his demonstration on texturing a turning by means of pyrography. Before Les picked up wood turning, he used to be an avid hand carver. His carvings were often embelished or accented with wood burnings. A nice wood burner is some that I may be interested in getting in the future to sign my work nicely on the bottoms.
In all, it was a productive and informative meeting that gave me some ideas to ponder over our summer break. Maybe, I will get a chance to apply some of these ideas in between the hot spells of the season.