I am new to woodturning, 3-4 months, and still learning. One thing I am fairly confident about though is the skew chisel. I noted that most of the turners in our woodturning group are wary of the skew chisel, don't use it much, and they warned me to be careful of it. Therefore, I was a bit intimidated by the skew and determined to master it and overcome that fear. I have done a lot of research on the skew, watched many youTube videos over and over again, practised heaps, suffered many catches, finally enjoyed some degree of success, and now it is my favourite tool.
One thing I picked up frpm watching Curtis Buchanan videos and Jake Gevorgian, was that they change hands when traversing the work from right to left, and then left to right. I've watched all of Jake's videos and he always changes hands when reversing direction - sometimes several times when cutting one cove or bead. Curtis said he was one handed for 20 years before he discovered the benefits of changing hands, and has been changing hands ever since (about 7 years).
I decided to train myself to change hands with all tools, and being new to woodturning, decided to get into good habits while I was learning - so, I always change hands, even though it is not always completely comfortable to do so.
But! - is it a good habit? Is it the right thing to learn?
I note that many of the world's top woodturners do not change hands and do everything with their right hand on the handle and left hand on the chisel and tool rest (or the opposite for left-handers).
Before I totally commit to one way or the other I would appreciate your advice on this matter.
The reasons I think changing hands might be a good thing to persevere with include:
- in time it will become muscle memory, comfortable, and automatic, like learning to use the clutch when learning to drive a car and changing gears with the left hand (in Australia, that is)
- it seems to make sense to me that by changing hands you are doing things exactly the same way, whichever direction your are travelling in (eg rolling your wrist inwards when turning a bead - not inwards when doing the left side and outwards when doing the right side)
- when I am rolling a bead at the extreme end of the spindle, I am further away from the head-stock and rotating chuck, rather than being in contact with one or other of them
- visibility is improved when turning beads and coves.
The down side of learning to be ambidextrous is that one suffers many more catches when learning to use the non-dominant hand, but this situation is improving.
There is not much about this on the Internet, so I would really appreciate the input of experienced woodturners in this group.
Many thanks, James