Gouges and making them.

Get a machine shop to price this on a one-up basis. Then get a heat treating place to do this, also on a one-up basis. Hardening and tempering simple steels like O-1 and W-1 are easy when the piece is small. Not so easy when it is large. And then, you are getting a steel which is far inferior to the ones usually used for gouges -- M2, M4, or powdered steels.

It is virtually impossible to home heat treat those steels -- the recipe is too complex and you need to hold temperatures within close tolerances.

Bill

Max63 wrote:

tips?

> 619-1610&PMPXNO=16719366 Hello Kevin,

The cost of the steel is not what makes bowl gouges expensive. It is the milling, polishing, hardening and tempering, makng and fitting a handle, overhead of the manufacturer, marketing and shipping to the eventual distributor, plus the distributor's markup. Have you priced the cost of having a channel milled in tool steel and the cost of having it heat treated as well as the clean up after heat treating.

If you have a friend who has a milling machine and will mill the flute for you for free and another friend who does heat threating of steel and will do it for free. You can get a fairly inexpensive carbon steel bowl gouge from your O1 steel. I think that you will find that high speed steel is a bit more expensive and the heat threating is much more complex.

I have a friend who makes limited numbers of bowl gouges, very good ones I might add, but he has to sell them for around $90.00 to $100.00. And he sells direct.

So, when you consider everything, the prices on bowl gouges are not really that great.

Fred Holder

I don't know how you could say it better than Bill or Fred's replies. Pretty much covers all the ground on the subject from materials, actual production and the reality of doing it as a onesy - twosy operation.

And unless you are someone that simply enjoys all the running around, scheduling, shipping, and plain old work, I wouldn't do it. I looked into this years ago with he idea of making a really strong bowl gouge; I wanted to make mine with the flute cut back only about 3 inches. I figured that would really cut down on any vibration, harmonics, etc.

So I figured that by the time the steel got here, I had the stock cut and the flute milled, sent it off to a knife manufacturer for proper tempering (a place in Houston will temper your blank with batches with other >like< steels, but you wait for a batch to be run) by someone that will Rockwell stamp the tool for verification, made a handle, cut a ferrule, polished out my newly tempered metal and then mounted it in my handle..... *huff*...*puff* ... I could probably buy about four of really nice gouges and still come out waaaay ahead.

Plus I could start using them in the time it took to ship to me. And we still aren't looking at any of the newer, fancy steels, either.

So I bought another Henry Taylor "artisan" and took the metal polishing stuff to it, and for $60 I had a great tool.

And for those that don't know, LITERALLY, the only difference I have found in the regular and artisan grades of tools are the finish on the metal. I have bought both regular and artisan, and being lazy if it is within a couple of bucks I will spring for regular, but if more than that I buy artisan. Some tools are very well worth making; to me, a bowl gouge isn't one of them.

Robert

Thanks for all the info. They are the reason I come here - for the wealth of experience. And I think I read somewhere:

Good judgement comes from experience - Experience comes from bad judgment.

With its companion: The great thing about experience is knowing when to cringe.

Thanks again

Amen... I know that Bill Noble has a milling machine and works with metal, but never heard him mention making his own fluted gouges..

mac

Please remove splinters before emailing

Or, as we say in the computer world, "Experience is the ability to recognize your mistakes when you repeat them"...

mac

Please remove splinters before emailing

I'd also mention this link which refers to an article first which appeared in "TURNAROUND", the newsletter of the Association of Woodturners of South Africa