Design Approaches - Start With A Blank Slate - Or ...?

Design Approaches - Start With A Blank Slate - Or ...?

One approach to coming up with designs for turnings is to look at many pieces as possible - photos, drawings, hands on - then pick a style or an aggregate of styles that appeals to you and start turning your versions.

Another approach is basically the application of western classical proportions - derived, unfortunately, mainly from Greek architecture - lots of geometry and layout lines. The wood is merely the medium for creating The Ideal Form.

The Form Follows Function Approach - a vase for a long stemmed rose - tall and narrow, with most of the weight as low as possible. The wood should not detract from the rose(s).

The cousin of The Form Follows Function approach is the "I Have This Slick Tool Which Does _____" and it's non-identical twin "I'm Really Good With This (skew, spindle gouge, skewgie, Ellsworth Grind) Tool."

- Tooling Determines the Piece

Some come at design from "It looks like it's made of (leather, metal, ceramic, stone) - but it's WOOD!". I see Turned Wood Cowboy Hats and all Segmented Turned Pieces in this "school". We use to call this sort of thing Mind F*CK - just screwing with your head - man.

Then there's the Mixed Media Approach - "If you look hard enough you'll eventually find the wood in this piece, amongst the gold and silver leaf, the titanium wires, chemical and paint patination and the ground stone and epoxy and mother of pearl inlay.".

The current D'jour Design Approach seems to be heavy on "texturing" - chatter tools, carving tools and grinding tools ads everywhere. At some point, someone will discover the pipe maker's Coral Cutting Machine (two flat spear point "drills", set about 20 degrees apart which rotate and alternate making contact with the wood - distance between contact points can be varied) and "coral" texturing will become the rage.

The What The Hell Is It approach sets out to create things in wood which a) don't look like anything anyone's ever seen before and b) selects wood that'll allow the making of some or all of the components of the piece. A ?Winged Vessel? is an example of this type of thing

Being formally trained as an engineer, I find the How In The Hell Did He/She Make That approach interesting. Escoulen's asymetric and eccentric turned pieces facinate me. These are the pieces that sometimes keep me awake for a day or so working out how they were probably done.

I personally lean heavily towards ?I wonder what?s hiding in this chunk of wood??. I just turned a series of small lidded boxes from an old split rail cedar fence post. Under the rough gray surface, below thirty years of dirt and grime

- tight straight grain. Perfect for aligning the lid to the base of a turned box. This approach often ends with nothing left to turn and a floor covered a foot deep in curlies and chips. Alas, large quantities of horse manure do not always mean there?s a pony somewhere close by, if not within the pile. But I?ve found a lot of ponies and the rest makes good composting material and kindling.

So what approach do you take when it?s for a piece just for you?

charlie b

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charlie b
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Yep I'm up for that. Coming from flatwork it seems the most logical

Hats are OK as a technical challenge but they are getting to be "old hat" (G) Segmented does nothing for me just makes me think "brick wall"

OK so we all get crummy wood once in a while and spend too long making a silk purse to find it is still a sows ear. So what are you gonna do?

Sometimes I'm tempted but the Sorby texture/spiral tools are out of my budget and I am not interested enough to make some of my own

"What the Hell" is normally my reaction when it goes seriously wrong! That's putting it mildly!

Now this is my Numero Uno obsession. Not so much the eccentric but multi centre. I have a vase that was done on 4 centres and I still haven't figured out how the hell it was done. It would be nice if I could figure out the geometry needed to give me some idea of what will be taken away and what will be left when a centre is moved. Hit and miss gets to be a bit of a let down and I'm not good at taking notes.

Well this is where I am right now and you know it's a comfortable place to be. I keep picking up pieces of junk wood from all over and hoping one of them has that $1M bowl, HF, thingamajiggy in it but no luck so far and hell I'm enjoying it!

Reply to
Canchippy

Sometimes I chuck it up because I think there's some nice grain beneath the bark and no other reason. Those times I really DO let the wood decide what it wants to be ... cutting until I think there is no more pretty to expose and it's all ugly after this.

Most days I turn the lathe on ... but not so often that I have lost my sense of wonder as the patterns in the wood begin to reveal themsleves. I'm not sure I could ever be a production turner. I stop to smell the shavings too often.

Other times I chuck up because I've seen something in a magazine and want to try out the techniques mentioned ... plus maybe a variation or two I have in the back of my mind. Fer instance (without giving too much away before I've had a chance to try it myself) there's a technique in the American Woodturner for Fall 2006 that I'd like to marry to a technique in the Summer issue of the same magazine ... and I'm thinking that the judicious addition of a -tiny- sliver of metal would make for a very compelling combination and a justifiably outrageous price.

Stay away from the AW magazines ... down that path lies insanity ... and insomnia!

Still other times I chuck up and try to guess what will actually make the current customer happy. Now THAT is the real challenge!

Bill

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Bill

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