Bowl Turning

I'll second what has been said here, especially the grain orientation bits. Always wear the mask. I've had four or five things glance off mine.Your tools must be as sharp as you can get them, and keep them sharp.Go to some You tube videos, there are some good ones out there. Iff the host is riding the lathe like a horse, choose another video. There are a couple of guys I find excellent, e.g. Brendan Stemp and Carl Jacobson. There are many others butyou'll find them. I use kiln dried blanks for most of my turning, largely because I'm afraid I'll be dead before it's time to turn the wood.

Get all the advice you can, see if there is a local turning club, or if any of the high schools do turning classes for adults. Good luck.

You're going to absolutely love the variable speed on the Nova when turning bowls. for spindles I think its perhaps a bit of a distraction but for bowl work it just rocks.

Nice job on the captive rings! Only 3 weeks you say like a fish to water apparently.

The variable speed is amazing. But even more so is the ability to so easily adjust my tool test and tail stock without having to reach under my lathe to loosen then move and tighten back up. So now I have another question. Chisel types?? Who makes a good reliable set. I currently have a couple Robert Sorby and some generic ones but I am looking to expand my collection and purchase better quality than the generic ones.

There are no better than Doug Thomson's, though there are more expensive ones. Some will suggest cheaper ones, but if you get a Thompson and don't like, you would be able to re-sell it so fast, your head will soon.

Welcome to the vortex! I guess we should have warned you up front about the costs of turning, beyond the basic cost of the lathe. Tool selection depends upon what you want to focus on turning, but some basics might include:

A good 1/2" bowl gouge will complete a bowl from start to finish. A good 1/2" spindle gouge will go a long way to completing a pepper mill. A parting tool is handy for almost everything, but you can make your own from a sawzall blade if you are clever. A spindle roughing gouge will help rough turn a spindle, but under no circumstances should it be used for anything else because of the inherent weakness of the thin tang. A skew can be tough to learn if you are self teaching, but once you get the hang of it your spindle work will go a lot easier. I have acquired a boatload of tools over the years from various manufacturers. You can't go wrong with tools from these guys: http://thompsonlathetools.com/, http://d-waytools.com/

Just as important as the tools is the sharpening system. A bench grinder with a cubic boron nitride (CBN) wheel or wheels (D-Way tools) and a Wolverine (Oneway) sharpening system works for me. I hone with a CBN or diamond card in between trips to the grinder so that the tools don't get ground down to nubs.

Other things you might want to consider:

- A tailstock chuck adapter for your lathe that lets you mount a chuck on your tailstock. It allows for correct alignment when remounting work to turn the other side.
- A decent live center system for your lathe.
- Sanding discs, mandrels etc. Vince has been my favorite for years. http://vinceswoodnwonders.com/

There are also a variety of carbide tools and manufacturers out there. I have some and use them but would recommend becoming skilled with traditional tools before venturing into the realm of carbide. My 2 cents.

Ted Calver said:

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There are also a variety of carbide tools and manufacturers out there. I have some and use them but would recommend becoming skilled with traditional tools before venturing into the realm of carbide. My 2 cents.

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I have some carbide tools. My suggestion is that a beginner, who isn't good at sharpening and can't believe how often lathe tools need to be sharpened, should consider carbide, but I have never gotten as good a finish with carbide as I can with a sharp HSS tool. And I spent much more than my 2 cents on carbide to learn that lesson.

Congrats on the new lathe. You made a good choice. You have gotten an early lesson on how buying inexpensive tools can end up costing more in the long run. It's a recurring theme in any shop, and pretty much all of us have experienced it.

Carl mitchell said:

...Will definitely be using the expansion hold instead of the compression from now on...

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Don't make any firm decisions at this point. Wait until you learn more about chucking. The expansion hold is more likely (in my experience) to have or cause problems than the compression hold. But the key to either type of chucking method is to make the tenon or recess match your chuck jaws. Equally important is knowing the difference between "tight enough" and "so tight it's breaking the wood". Personally, I prefer a tenon, but I've used a recess when it seemed appropriate.

For tool suggestions, I'll echo Carol. Doug Thompson makes great tools. They are mid-priced, but they are among the best you can buy. And there are plenty that are more costly that aren't as good, IMO. I'd also suggest not looking for a set, but instead buying chisels as you need them. If you want to turn bowls, a standard 5 or 6 piece chisel set quite likely will only have one or two tools that you'll actually use. Personally, my go-to tools are several bowl gouges, a couple of thick scrapers, a detail gouge, and (every once in a while) a parting tool. I've got skews that seldom get used. And a few cheap spindle gouges that I have no use for at all. That all said, a lot of us started out with the HSS tool set that Harbor Freight sells. I still use the parting tool from that set, and re-ground one of the (otherwise useless to me) scrapers into a dovetail scraper for shaping tenons to match my chucks. The rest of the tools got me started, but have since been abandoned or replaced with better tools.

And Ted is again spot on with his suggestions to invest in good sharpening gear. Once I discovered how a properly-sharpened tool operated, turning became a lot more enjoyable for me. The Oneway Wolverine jig is pretty much the industry standard. Great tool. I got a lot of use out of Penn State's knock-off version, which is serviceable, but not as solid as the Oneway jig. Other guys get good results with homemade versions. And although my current dry grinder has high-quality stone wheels, I plan to replace them at some point with CBN wheels. (I also use a Tormek wet grinder for my gouges, but that's a pretty expensive proposition for a new turner. I only have one because I found a deal on a used one that I couldn't pass up.)

I have both some Thompson and some Benjamins Best from pennstateind.com.

The latter are generally quite serviceable and reasonably priced although I've read a few folks having found one not properly hardened I haven't had any problems in the ~2 dozen~ tools I've bought.

The thompson stays sharp ~3x the time the BB does (and the similar sized bowl gouge is substantially "beefier" which is especially nice on larger pieces). I believe that if I switched to a CBN wheel I would like the Thompsons even more, the steel they use has slightly larger carbides and the friable white wheel I'm using tends to pull those out degrading the edge slightly whereas the CBN will actually cut the carbides and leave them in place. Most regular HSS (like that used in the BB chisels) has somewhat smaller carbides and although they are still pulled out the impact isn't quite as significant. Having all Thompson would somewhat limit the things I could do though from a budgetary perspective I think they're worth it for the high use tools (bowl gouges, maybe skew, depends on what you do...) but perhaps less so for less frequently used tools (a bit more time sharpening isn't a huge cost for that use case).

I've also made a number of small tools out of allen wrenches and some custom scrapers out of some old planer blades (pack of 20 for $1 at an estate sale wooo).