some times you just need to walk away...

Ned Bulken

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Lakeport NY and/or the nearest hotel
after getting the shop in relative order, I decided to try my hand at turning and carving some spoons as a ‘getting back into the swing of things’ project after the winter.yeah….right…I cut several spoonish shapes out of some poplar, figuring, hey it’s a soft-er hardwood, easy to carve, right? suuure. I dig out my spoon plane, and my hook blade and proceed to go through all of the blanks in short order, saving just one of them, which wound up as a spatula instead of a spoon.oh, and I discovered that my spoon plane blade is indeed sharp… note to self, get a chain mail glove… asap, this will help keep the bright red stuff off of the product.then I grab a piece of ‘dunno’ wood, which was a bit thicker than the poplar, and instead of cutting the shape, then carving the bowl out, I scooped out the bowl, Then cut the rough handle etc… intending on turning the handle down to round on the lathe. can’t manage to do that, the handle looks like an angry drunk beaver with halitosis attacked it, and then just as I try and get it smoothed out I hear a squeak, then a snap and the ‘bowl’ end of the spoon just disappears.mutter, mutter, curse….ok, grab a hunk of maple and start cutting out a pair of spoon blanks on the bandsaw… evidently symmetry is not something I can manage on the bandsaw tonight either.I turned out the lights, locked up the shop and came in to dinner.
 
You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.

We've all had those days, better luck next time!

Never used (or heard of before) a spoon plane, neat looking gadget. I've been using a couple of gouges with pretty good success for the bowl, the one thing I sort of figured out by accident that has really saved me a whole bunch of grumpy is to not cut with the grain with the gouge but work at an angle to it; you get a much cleaner cut and it won't split out if you have a wild spot.

The hardest part for me doing spoon carving is figuring out good work holding techniques. I suspect that this is part of your red substance contaminating the wood problem :eek:, usually if I see the sharp part pointing at a body part in an uncontrolled fashion[1] I'm thinking figuring I'm doing something wrong and step back to figure out how to do what I'm doing wrong.

[1] uncontrolled is somewhat relative of course :D I know I do some cuts that I would cringe to see some other people doing, but I feel perfectly safe doing them because I have a positioned my hands to stop the cut or otherwise control the chisel .. I've also been wrong so its a learning process :rofl:
 
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