Monday 4 April 2011

An Alder bowl

This evening I popped over to the barn to finish off a small alder bowl that I started at the weekend. Here’s how I left it at that point…

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I’d wanted to do a curled over lip but kept breaking the edge so decided to cut this off. I was also going to mount this on my screw chuck hence the small size of the base, however when I glued a block to it and drilled it out on the lathe I found that it was off-centre when I chucked it.

After a bit of investigation it would seem that it’s a combination of the chuck & screw chuck so I may have to make another screw chuck and see how I get on with that. Instead I made a dovetail in the base and chucked it that way.

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At present I don’t have large jaws for the chuck so this is how I finish off the base of my bowls – necessity is the mother of invention. I’ve had one spin off into orbit like this (and needless to say it was ruined) but it seems to work well for small bowls such as this.

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The alder was nice to turn and looks nice finished off.

Saturday 2 April 2011

Another place for everything…

I’ve been neglecting the lathe for a few weeks as I’ve been playing with a MIG welder and having fun with that, but this evening I decided it was time to do some work on the lathe itself and so I built the following…

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Sorry the picture’s a bit rubbish, it was taken on my phone. I had some galvanised sheet in the workshop from a garage door that I took off (it’s always worth hoarding some bits, you’ll never know when they’ll come in handy). I made a bracket on the left hand side with this steel and drilled/tapped two 4mm holes in the main column to attach it – breaking one tap in the process but thankfully I had another.

The other end is attached with a screw & washer through an existing hole on the leg. I used my forstner bits to drill the large holes for the tools, and had to make the left hand one larger still to fit the ferrule of my bowl gouge.

Happy with the new addition I turned the outside of a 6” * 3” Alder lump which was really nice to turn, and had a small area of spalting which looks rather nice on the side of the bowl. I’ll post a picture once it’s finished.