Musing if turning well is a lack of failure or a hope for glory.

Actually Arch, I think the phrase in this case is "where there's smoke there's kindling." I do not know about the quality of my turning, but the quality of learning is directly proportional to the amount of kindling generated. One of the best teaching or learning techniques in my book is to take a piece that I have turned well, at least at first glance, and run it through the band saw. That way I get a very different look at mistakes and successes.

For most of us, you'd need a CSI team to go through the ashes, Arch... *lol*

IMHO, in turning as well as many of the silly things that we do in our lives, there are no failures.... just experiments or tries that didn't work... and we have to build off them...

Probably not true, but the story goes that someone asked Edison how it felt to finally get a bulb to work after about 1,000 failures... he supposedly said something like "I never failed, I simply discovered 999 ways that didn't work"... Mac

I have never been able to take a turned bowl and run it through the bandsaw. It may be just because I am too cheap. I mean why ruin a perfectly good (or maybe not perfect) bowl that will sell for $25 or more, just to see if the walls have a perfect thickness. Use calipers ( I like the bent wire kind that I saw on the David Elsworth videos), then run your hands and fingers over the inside and outside of the bowl. You can feel any bigger bumps, and smaller ones will sand out. I can measure from the rim of the bowl to the bottom, and see if the thickness is consistant, but cut it in half? Never. robo hippy

So what's of advantage in "consistent thickness" anyway? Fair curves inside and out are all I worry about. I let the bottom thickness grow, using the lower center of gravity thus developed to compensate for a narrower base. This isn't pottery, after all, where differences in thickness can destroy it in the kiln.

As to pushing oneself, that's great, but as Harry once said, "a man's got to know his limits." We need the wisdom to know where those limits lie.

You do get a better view of the form when you cut a piece in half. If you look at the 'whole', you are distracted by finish and grain. When you look at the cut edge of a piece you are seeing unadorned Form and can learn a lot from it.

Rather that cut the bowl in two and make fancy firewood, Feel it. I can feel the thickness of a bowl and tell if it's uniform throughout or not. I'm sure that most turners can. I agree with the others that it seems a waste of time, effort and money to willingly destroy something I made just to determine wall thickness which can be determined by other means. Furthermore, does it really matter if the wall of a bowl is a uniform

1/8" or 1/32" thickness throughout or if the thickness varies from 1/8" to 1/4" as long as the shape and finish pleases the eye?

"Ralph" wrote: (clip) Furthermore, does it really matter if the wall of a bowl is a uniform 1/8" or 1/32" thickness throughout or if the thickness varies from 1/8" to 1/4" as long as the shape and finish pleases the eye? ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Well, you never know when a customer might take one of your bowls home and saw it in half, and then come back and complain if things are not right. Maybe you should hand out a little brochure, warning that the bowl is neither dishwasher nor bandsaw safe.

Actually, I think you can learn a lot from cutting a piece in half, or quarters or whatever. And I am not only talking about rejects, I think that we do not look enough at what we do well and seek to improve it. Ok, mostly I am talking about myself here. One of the things I do and as far as I can tell most turners as well, is to turn for constant thickness. It gives a rightness of feel and balance to a piece and also lets it dry and or settle with less chance of splitting. The most accurate way to determine if a piece has constant thickness is to cut it along the center line. In my experience turners can not tell if a piece is constant thickness by feel nor with most calipers where the jedgement is made by the gap left as you slide one foot of the caliper up the edge of the piece. Besides, my fingers only reach in so far, and for a hollow form maybe not at all. What I am advocating here is turning for education and skill development. I am not cutting a $25 bowl, I am finishing a classroom exercise by running it through the band saw.

Form is More than thickness.

We had one of the boys in our club a few months ago and turn a wonderful deep bowl out of ash. He was pretty busy as the bowl was about 11" in diameter and about 8" deep. He took it from rough log to sanding to 220 in about an hour. He mounted a disk on the headstock, pulled up the tailstock for some light pressure, and cut off all signs of the dovetail he was using to hold it. All that was left was the little nub from the piece left on where the point of the center was holding the piec on the disk.

He hollowed the bowl with the walls and bottom consistently at about

1/4" thickness, with a nice rim cut down to about an 1/8". We passed the bowl around and we all admired it a lot.

Then he went over to the bandsaw and cut it in half to show us that there were indeed places where he was almost a 1/16" fat, and there were a couple of small valleys that were imperceptible after sanding that none of us saw. Personally, I would have been thrilled to have made the bowl, then even happier still to do it so easily, maintaining a friendly, relaxed style of instruction while roughing/hollowing/turning.

He thought it was absolutely hilarious to see how visibly shaken some of the people in the club were, including me. He felt like you could never REALLY understand what you did to the wood until you profiled it. He felt like you couldn't understand the profile and actual geometry what you were looking at on the lathe unless you knew for sure by opening up the piece. He credits his ability to turn quickly and accurately to "breaking a few eggs" along the way to make sure he was getting the thicknesses and internal profiles he does so easily.

Having done professional carpentry most of my life, I don't have a lot of compunction about tearing up my work to take a look at it to satisfy my own curiosity. But I haven't quite come to the point of being able to saw a bowl in half. A small vase, yes. A cup, yes. A bowl? No way. Of course, I can't turn one out that fast either. He told us that was a 30 minute project (tops) if he was really after it and wasn't talking while he was turning. Sheesh.

Robert

Have we met?

The last cut is always the last cut if you take another cut than it was not the last cut, GEEEEEA I turn thick and I turn thin, even in and out and not, some are smooth and shiny others are not, some are large and some are small. If it looks right and it feels right TO ME, it is right for ME. If someone else does not like it TOO BAD I might end up with a barn full of turnings nobody wants, but I don't have that problem jet.

Have fun and take care Leo Van Der Loo

or very expensive dog food scoops... Mac

I think that's the key, Leo...

If you like and are happy with it, it's good...

If it gets compliments and sells, it's even better... Mac

For me, woodworking is a fascinating trip, with an infinite number of places to visit, no destination and the things I make are merely postcards from the journey. Since I do it for fun and not for money and the trip lasts a lot longer than a cruise or guided tour, the trip can last 'til I get patted in the face with a shovel full of dirt.

As long as a port of call is interesting enough, I'll stay and get to know the place better. Turning turns out to be a pretty interesting place. Relative to furniture making, turning is like the Wild West, few if any functional demands, little if any joinery to learn, no "it also has to fit in this space AND go with other things in the room" and few, if any moving parts - that have to fit AND work. Add to that, it doesn't use up much material and you can make or modify many of the tools. If, however, you're a tool freak, which I am, the "tools and accessories" can lighten the checking account as fast, if not faster, than with furniture making stuff.

As for thin walled, almost closed vessels, with thin uniform walls, I still think a ceramics wheel and clay is a better way to make those forms. Being able to have fingers on both the inside and outside of the object as it's created seems a lot easier than poking calipers or using lasers to find out wall thickness.

Fun stuff this woodworking thing - turning being one of the funner parts.

charlie b

In the interest of Full Disclosure, most of the items I've cut in half blew up on the lathe. Then I ran them through the bandsaw to get a better look at where I screwed up - after a lot of effort. :o)

You're seeing two dimensions of what was a three-dimensional piece. Not sure if you should even call it the same thing.

The only bowls that I have seen that had a uniform thickness throughout, are 'earthquake' bowls by Larry Karlin of Roseburg, OR. They are round on the bottom to rock if there is an earthquake. The foot on a bowl will add thick spots, or you will have a flat bottom with a rather sharp angle in the transition area, which won't look or feel good. robo hippy