Newsletter 31 - Garden of England Woodturners

NEWSLETTER
Number 31 — November 2009
Website : www.gardenofenglandwoodturners.org
Chairman’s Corner – November 2009
There are four important topics I would like to mention this month:
The "Club Christmas Dinner" is the first. After some representation from Members who were told that they could not attend the
original date of 12 December, it has been confirmed that it will now
be held at Brogdale on Friday 11th December, 7.00 for 7.30 pm.
You should find details elsewhere in this Newsletter, but those who
intend to attend, please get your orders & cheque to Warwick as
soon as is possible. We look forward to a high class meal, with
“Bring Your Own” wine with the new Caterers at Brogdale.
CHRISTMAS DINNER
At The Courtyard Restaurant, Brogdale
Friday 11th December 7.00pm for 7.30
Cost: £18 (inc 10% service)
There will be a free Quiz run by Pat & Ron
Annual Subscriptions for 2010. When Bill hands out the forms for
us all to rejoin the club next year, you should notice that he has
once more quoted the same rates as this year. This is not a mistake! The committee has decided, due to the financial situation in
the club, not to implement the higher rates approved at the 2008
AGM.
We will doubtless be discussing this at the next AGM planned for
16 February 2010. Bill will be putting out a formal notice in due
course, but if there is any new topic you would like to have on the
Agenda, or if you wish to stand for any of the committee positions,
please let me know. Please note the date in your diary. At that
meeting it seems that we will be looking for a new Secretary (Bill
has decided to stand down), and a new general committee member to replace John Symons. Although John is happy to continue
with the Newsletter for the moment, he is finding it increasingly difficult to get to our meetings regularly. Please consider whether
you can take up one of these two posts.
Finally, I would ask all members who come to hands-on meetings with the intention of joining in, to bring their own jackets/smocks and safety glasses.
Club T-shirts & Sweat Shirts
A local supplier (who already provides clothing to local clubs and
schools) will provide sweat-shirts and polo shirts, with the embroidered logo at no extra cost, provided that we order a minimum
quantity of 10 (mixed sweat and polo shirts)
Prices are:
Classic Pique Polo Shirt (220 gsm, 50/50% poly/cotton - £10 each
Classic Sweat Shirt (300 gsm, 50/50% poly/cotton)
- £15 each.
Sizes:
XS S M
L
XL 2XL
36" 38" 40" 42/44" 46" 48"
3XL 4XL
50/2" 54"
Colours: Navy is recommended, as the logo will have no background, and Navy will best represent the logo. For the more adventurous, other colours are White, Black, Royal, Red, Bottle Green,
Heather Grey, Sky, Maroon and Yellow.
He will also embroider the logo onto own smocks etc (subject to
suitability) for £5.00, but we would have to take in a batch of them
to get this price.
Contact: John Davey if you’d like to find out more
Raffle Prizes gratefully accepted in aid of Club
Funds
You must pay at least a £5 deposit per head
when you book and indicate your choices from
the new menu (see below)
Starters
Homemade roasted vine tomato & basil soup with a granary roll
Wild mushroom pate with granary toast
Prawns on a bed of lettuce, homemade rose marie dressing and
granary bread
Homemade terrine with pork, veal and duck served with a cherry
relish and rustic bread
Mains
Succulent free range turkey with homemade bread sauce and all
the trimmings for a traditional Christmas meal
Roasted vegetable filo parcels, served with new potatoes and
steamed vegetables
Poached salmon with a lemon & watercress sauce accompanied
by new potatoes and steamed vegetables
Deserts
Christmas Pudding with brandy butter served with a choice of
custard cream or ice cream
Poached Brogdale pear in mulled wine and crème fraiche
Chef’s special - melting chocolate sponge with fresh cream
Please book early—if you can pay the
£18 now it’ll make Warwick’s life easier!
This is your newsletter. Some of the contributors this time are:
Roger Dugdale, Terry Rand, Bill Shepherd, Warwick Neech
and John Davey. Many thanks to all of you.
The editor is John Symons who can be contacted by:
Email at john@symons.me.uk and Phone on 01227 751671
Website: www.gardenofenglandwoodturners.org
Visit of Joey Richardson on 5th September 2009
Joey has a quiet diffident personality which
hides her driving enthusiasm to express her
feelings and thoughts in wooden sculptures.
These are initially created on the lathe and
then modified by extensive piercing and colouring. She has a wealth of practical knowledge and freely shared it with us, suggesting
projects which we were capable of tackling.
Her enthusiasm was infectious and she held
our close attention for the whole day.
One of Joey’s
3D flowers
Joey’s work can be seen on
www.joeyrichardson.com . She was fortunate to get a bursary
from the Worshipful Company of Turners to travel in the
United States and spent time working with Bin Pho,
www.angelfire.com/il2/binpho/ , who profoundly affected her work. He told her to ‘put
her heart and story into every piece she
makes’. Now before she starts a piece she
assembles images and photos to do with
something in her own experience which
sparks the birth of the new piece of work,
which is then personal and close to her.
Piercing Tools and Technique
You must be sitting comfortably, support your arm and just
move your wrist.
Joey used a Dremel tool at first and used similar cutters
to Mick Hanbury’s which many of us have. Now she
uses a NSK presto air tool with a speed of 36000 rpm.
This has sealed bearings and is excellent but costs
$360 in the States and needs a
new expensive turbine replaced
eventually. A cheaper, but good
alternative is the Powercrafter from
Turner’s Retreat, This does not
A greeting have a sealed bearing so needs
card doodle! oiling, is noisier and spits oil on the
work.
The first hole is pierced
Work to be pierced needs to be an even thickness of about
3mm (1/8”).The tool needs to be used vertically and cuts
made in a clockwise direction. Start in a corner and finish in a
corner, this makes it easier to create smooth pierced shapes.
The cutter burns the wood, don’t inhale the fumes, use an
extractor. To clean up the cut surfaces use sandpaper or to
speed things up use a bristle abrasive brush (320- 400 grit
from 3M) slowly in a clockwise direction.
Decorative Coloured Infills
Use crushed stone or brass filings (from a key
cutter) set in thin superglue. Use a diamond
file to sand any rough surfaces as it is harder
than the wood. Or Araldite can be used with a
splash of paint to colour it. Try to avoid air
bubbles, refill it again if necessary and leave it overnight to
cure. Sand it smooth.
Colouring with an air brush
There are many air brushes on the market.
Go to a place that will advise you like
‘Graphics Direct’ on the internet or
‘Chromos’ in Canterbury. Any compressor
will do as the air brush doesn’t use much
air. Joey used a small gravity fed type. She
uses any paint, providing it’s the right con-
sistency. She used ‘Golden’ transparent acrylic as it shows the grain
of the wood but she also uses
opaque and pearlised as well. For a
cleaner she uses everyday
‘windolene’ diluted 30:70 with water,
don’t waste your money on commercial cleaners. Never leave paint in
the air brush as it sets hard!
Joey masks areas she doesn’t want to paint with stickyback plastic – uses a scalpel to trim it to shape. Colours
can bleed. A way to stop this is to lightly pyrograph over
the borders before colouring. Masking tape or watercolour
masking fluid can also mask the work. The wood surface
must not be sanded too smooth otherwise the paint won’t
stick, 320 grit is about right. Spraying can raise the grain.
Other things to experiment with are oil colour pencils
(blending colours with a cotton bud or finger) and Prisma
colour markers (dampen with alcohol).
Turning a Bowl
Use sycamore as it is close grained and white so colours
show. Turn it wet and thin, store it in a paper bag to dry
slowly. As the heart will be cut out it won’t move much.
Hollow gradually, carving an area near the top first and
then turning the wall thin further in to carve next. Get rid of
chucking points with a Dremel drum sander. Sand the
edges of bowls to make them fine, this gives an optical
illusion of delicacy.
For patterns you can use iron-on transfer from a needlework shop or you can look on the internet, or use photos.
To transfer patterns use a photocopier or a laser printer;
tape the image to the work and use a dab of cellulose
thinners or nail polish remover (acetone) on the back. Rub
with the edge of a credit card to transfer the pattern.
Joey gains inspiration from books like ‘Art forms in Nature’ featuring the work of Ernst Haekel and also books
about Celtic Knotwork.
Texturing a Box lid
Joey used a ball (no.2) on a Dremel tool to texture the
wood. Then she coloured the texture to emphasize it. She
showed how you can use a needle scaler air tool to highlight grain on ash. It is then sprayed
with an air brush and sanded leaving the softer wood white.
Finishing
Finishing is very important. Joey
used Chestnut acrylic satin lacquer.
Leave the paint overnight to dry first
then apply several coats of lacThis impressive 3D
quer. Gently sand with 3M microflower is made up of 3
finishing film or wet and dry polseparate loose layers standishing film between coats to
ing one on top of the next!
produce a high sheen.
Joey emphasized that you must get the turned shape
right first – and then you can go on to enhance the
surface with texturing.
John Symons
Woodturning Demonstration by Stuart King 3rd October 2009
We are lucky. We get so many talented demonstrators visiting our woodturning clubs. Some are fast, some are born
teachers, most are humorous but, when it comes to versatility, Stuart is not only hard to beat, he’s hard to equal. This
is the fourth time I have had the privilege of seeing him and
listening to him, twice with GEW and twice when I was a
member of the AWGB Kent Branch. I knew him to be a
good and interesting woodturner as
well as a talented artist. I knew he had
grown up amongst the last of the traditional chair bodgers, had first hand experience of their traditional tools and
methods but I had not quite appreciated
what a knowledgeable historian he is.
Now, amongst other things, he describes himself as a photojournalist –
and, as in everything else he touches,
You don’t have to stick to he is excellent in this capacity too. I
conventional turning tools! like his skill, his knowledge and appreciation of woodland crafts and his economical approach to turning. Before
starting he explained that he didn’t buy timber but instead
just pops down to the woods for a piece. On this occasion
he had found some nice wild cherry and other wood including beech. He used the cherry for his first demo.
Goblet.
His aim was to do most of the exterior work using one tool
only, a roughing out gouge with what he called a Chesham
grind (you won’t find it in the textbooks, he said!) The gouge
was slightly skewed and had an extra little flat designed for
the specific purpose of forming a spigot. After this was done,
the piece was mounted in gripper jaws, which were emphatically tightened, and the outside of the goblet’s bowl was
roughly shaped before hollowing. A 3/8 inch spindle gouge
was used for hollowing and Stuart’s advice was to use it with
the flute at nine or ten o’clock. He recommended finishing
the inside with a fine scraper and the only abrasive he used
was that thrown away by other professionals! (He was full
of little profanities like that. I hope I’ve got it right. Another
one was that multi-faceted cutting edges were ok providing
the last facet was true.). He recommended finishing the
inside of the goblet’s bowl with beeswax heated with a hair
drier to make it watertight. He finished off the outside of the
goblet’s bowl with the roughing
out gouge and then refined the
stem with a round skew. At
some stage he filled the goblet
with coffee to test its watertightness and, on checking after the
afternoon session found no evidence of coffee escaping..
mation on reciprocal lathes (i.e. pole lathes and bow lathes)
including the bit he showed us about Mustafa of Morocco.
This clever man sits on a low stool and steadies his lathe
(which also sits on the floor) with his left foot, supplies the
power with the bow in his right hand and controls the chisel
with his right foot and his left hand. In this clip he is turning
a chess piece, all beads and coves with, I think, a captive
ring. You will find Mustafa in an article entitled Marrakech is
so Moorish. Just before lunch Stuart turned the same chess
piece as Mustafa turns on the video but, unlike the Moroccan, he is using two hands on the chisel and has both his
feet planted firmly on the floor. Elsewhere, the web site also
shows details of his automaton, called the rat catcher, which
Stuart started the day off with, saying that woodturning
should be fun. Somewhere, too, is a photo of his extensive
array of model Windsor chairs which he has
made – and so much else besides.
It was after lunch that Stuart introduced us
to a selection of his miniature Windsor
chairs and gave a talk on the local history of
the chairmaking and furniture-making community in which he grew up. It was during
this talk that I learned that a badger was an
itinerant salesman (of chairs); hence the
expression “don’t badger me”.
Stuart finished off the day with some more
turning, producing first of all a spinning top made from
Cherry. Next came his flowers made from Hazel and coloured with felt pens and lastly:
An off-centre Finial made from a block of spalted beech
which I judged to be a little more than 2” square in section..
This was mounted in gripper jaws while the spigot was
formed. It was then reversed into the gripper jaws but with
the spigot angled slightly so that the finial was turned off centre.. By re-mounting it in the jaws, a second length of offcentre finial was formed and, by another repetition of this
process a further length was added. Sanding and finishing
is necessary at each stage because the finial cannot easily
be remounted in its intermediate positions in the gripper
jaws. The spalted beech was well chosen and formed a
very handsome finial.
So ended another super day,
thanks to Stuart. If my report is a
little shorter than usual it is because there is so much to see on
his web site and I have spent so
long exploring it.. My computer
skills are pretty minimal and this is
the first time I’ve got so much from
the Internet at one session, thanks
largely to my ever helpful pc support, Bill.
Automaton by Stuart King
Mustafa from Morocco
Using his laptop Stuart took us
on a whirlwind tour of some of his
A Mustafa
efforts in photojournalism showing, amongst other things, how lathes have developed over
hundreds of years and all over the world. He has videos
and still photos showing metal spinning of bronze throughout the ages,
including a video taken in Ballarat in
Australia. If you have a PC and
have access to the Internet you can
find all his stuff on
www.stuartking.co.uk It is fascinating
and comprehensive. There is inforMetal Spinning
Roger
Our Club Website has a lot of up to the minute information about Club Activities, Galleries of our work and Past
issues of this Newsletter. See it at:
www.gardenofenglandwoodturners.org
Inter-Club Competition with Wealden Woodturners at
Robertsbridge
I would like to thank all our members and their wives and partners
for turning out and making this an excellent event. It is the first
time I have competed with unknown woodturners and had my
work judged by a professional. Mark Baker did an excellent job
and said he had a hard time judging the work, as the work was so
good and diverse.
I am afraid we didn’t win any prizes, only on the raffle! But Mark
commended the work of Ken Smith, Frank Haywood and Brian
Wilmshurst and said with minor improvements they could have
been amongst the best.
The prizes on offer were impressive and all donated. Mark had
given a subscription to ‘Woodturning’ magazine, there was a £50
voucher from Ashley Iles, a Kryo turning tool from Henry Taylor, a
hand sanding system from Hegner, a prize from Crown and a very
large Australian Burr from Stiles & Bates.
All our members had a good chinwag with most of their members,
everybody was very chatty and enjoyed the day out.
Bill Shepherd
On our Tuesday evening meeting in October..,
Warwick has been practicising with the new Club
sharpening system, made by Sorby that we purchased with some of our lottery money. He demonstrated how to use this and went on to show people
individually.
Bill Carden showed us how to make well designed tool
handles and showed us some new ideas, including the
use of rubber cricket bat grips. Of course, being Bill,
he went straight to the heart and visited The Shop at
the St Lawrence ground in Canterbury for supplies!
Garden of England Woodturners
Events for 2010
Saturday 2nd January
No Meeting
Tuesday 12th January
Hands-on, BJ &Denis, Spindle work
Please bring wood & tools
Saturday 6th February
Mark Baker Professional Woodturner.
Tuesday 16th February
AGM
Saturday 6th March
Hands-on Lets have all lathes working
Please bring wood and tools
Tuesday 16th March
Hands-on BJ & Denis Face work
Please bring wood & tools
Saturday 3rd April
John Berkeley Professional Woodturner
Tuesday 13 th April
Hands-on
Saturday 1st May
To be arranged
Tuesday 11th May
Hands-on
Saturday 5th June
Gary Rance Professional Woodturner.
Tuesday 15th June
Hands-on
Saturday 3rd July
To be arranged.
Tuesday 13th July
Hands-on
Saturday 7th August
Les Thorne Professional Woodturner
Tuesday 17th August
No meeting – School closed
Saturday 4th September
Simon Hope Professional Woodturner
Tuesday 14th September
Hands-on
Saturday 2nd October
To be arranged
Tuesday 12th October
Hands-on
Saturday 6th November
Mick Hanbury Professional Woodturner
Tuesday 16th November
Hands-on
Saturday 4th December
To be arranged
Tuesday 14th December
Hands-on
Please keep this page carefully for future reference