Well, we got the center/-saver last night and the wife and I watched the dvd and then tried it out...
After 2 attempts, I can now make a funnel in 1/2 the time with a LOT less mess.. that's an improvement, right??
I got the standard set... after talking to Bill Grumbine and a few other of my heroes, it seemed the right size for a 14", 1 hp lathe..
I think that this will be a really cool tool and save a lot of time, wood & shavings, but...
Like any other skill, it's going to take a lot of practice and some experimentation... it's not what I expected, but I usually expect too much.. *g* I thought that you would lock the blade in, set it up, and just rotate the handle to cut the bowl out... (yeah, right)
Little did I know that you also feed the knife in, try not to hit the walls of the kerf, maintain angles, etc... not a LOT of stuff to learn, but not the instant gratification that I expected..
On the 1st blank, with my wife giving advice (she learned more from the dvd then I did) and standing by the OFF button, the first cut was pretty funny... I just fed tool until I made contact with the blank and started turning the pivot... made a kerf that was 1/4" deep and about 1" wide and was done... rofl
On the 2nd try, we sort of worked it out (IMO, the instructions enclosed suck), to feed a lot and rotate a little, and started coring, sort of... She said it was looking "really good", I was sort of visualizing the bowl as we cut the kerf, and had images of trying to cut a kerf in the chuck jaws... Well, we were both right... the cut was clean and round, and we cut the bottom off the blank... about 1/4" larger than the tenon in the jaws!
On the 3rd attempt, after truing, cleaning up the tenon and rechucking, we did get a nice bowl out of the blank and a usable core... This was all with a pine blank about 13" x 6" that really gave it's all for the lesson... I kept imagining the wood saying something like "just kill me now, quit torturing me!"...
Thanks to the folks that helped and encouraged the decision to try this.. it's gonna be fun..
Special note to Bill Grumbine: Please notice that in both pictures, I'm flexing my turning muscle... *g*
mac
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