Thread: First square turning

Hi bassmansimon,
A great first effort the bowl look's great watch those corners with the fingers.
Regards Rod.

Nice job. So, are you hooked on winged bowls yet?

FWIW, gluing sacrificial pieces onto the edges and turning the blank round first can save your fingers a lot of grief when sanding, plus avoid a helluva lot of tearing on on the leading/trailing edges. It's a simple matter to cut the sacrificial pieces away then touch up on a linisher later.

The indents from the chuck jaws are a PITA aren't they? (Again, you can glue on a sacrificial tenon and remove that later... but sometimes it's just nice to throw a piece on a lathe without great forethought and just have fun, innit? 'Specially Huon... gotta love that smell!)

bassmansimon,

Very nice!!

You can remove the indentations on the foot by putting the piece face down on some padding and taking a long strip of sand paper about 1/2 inch wide and sanding around the foot like polishing a shoe with a rag.

Keep turning the piece 1/4 turn and go round & round.

Yes, it is a pain.

Thanks yes it's a bit annoying. I'll try that trick, thanks.

Noice!!!

Originally Posted by Skew ChiDAMN!!

The indents from the chuck jaws are a PITA aren't they?

These can be avoided by making the foot size the same as the chuck jaws when the jaws form a perfect circle.

This is when they are only open about 2 or 3 mm.

At this size there is maximum wood to metal contact.

This equals maximum holding strength.

On soft or easy to mark timbers one turn of masking tape can help to avoid marking.

Any more than one turn and the work holding ability will start to get spongy.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Tim

Thanks for the tip Tim. I know about making the foot smaller so that it fits better, but was a bit nervous about making my dovetail because I had a bad experience once where I had a dig in the timber causing the foot to be smaller than my chuck jaws even at their tightest.

Didn't know about the tape trick.

I usually aim for 4 or 5 mm larger than the closed jaw size, if I miss that size there is still a chance I might get a second go with it.

When cutting the foot to size, you might like to try scraping with the point of a sharp skew with the tool held parallel to the bed of the lathe.

With care you can make cuts of a millimetre or less. You need of course to allow for the slight dovetail.

If you try and cut the foot size with the tool at 90 degrees to the lathe bed it is difficult to control the amount of material being removed.

Remembering that for every millimetre removed the diameter gets 2mm smaller.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Tim

nice bowl sim!!

hi simon,
very nicely done ,shame about the chuck marks,heon pine is very soft
timber ,i sometimes wrap masking tape around the tenon,that helps
also i have made a template out of perspex/plastic to ''size the tenon''
hope this helps
cheers smiife

Originally Posted by Tim the Timber Turner

When cutting the foot to size, you might like to try scraping with the point of a sharp skew with the tool held parallel to the bed of the lathe.

With care you can make cuts of a millimetre or less. You need of course to allow for the slight dovetail.

If you try and cut the foot size with the tool at 90 degrees to the lathe bed it is difficult to control the amount of material being removed.

Hi Tim, I'm working on another bowl at the moment, and using the skew with the tool held parallel to the lathe bed worked much better. Thanks for the tip.