Hunka Hunka Turning Love...........

Stuart Ablett

Member
Messages
15,917
Location
Tokyo Japan
........... OK, maybe not "love" but I sure had fun doing this!

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OK, I had this largish chunk of Ginko, it was a pie shaped wedge from one of the larger section, I cut the tip off of the piece, and was going to cut another bowl blank, but to do so, I'd waste a lot of wood, that looked to have a fair amount of sweet grain in it, and an inclusion of bark, so I decided to use my lathe to make this chunk round (see Frank! :))

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At first I used the worm screw and chuck this worked OK, but eventually, due to some fairly heavy hits it was taking, I changed over to the normal drive center.

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Bit by bit it is getting round

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Sure nice to have a 1" thick tool rest for this stuff, not to mention the super hefty P&N roughing gouge on a homemade long handle :thumb:

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You can sure tell when it is getting rounder, as the chips become long strings, and everything smooths out!

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I cut a big hefty tenon on the one end to fit my big hefty bowl jaws for my little G# chuck

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The tenon is now chucked up!:thumb:

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Boy this wood is wet, you can see the drop of water on my light, when I saw this, I turned the lathe of, and unplugged the light, then wiped it off with a rag, and moved it so it was not in the line of fire for the water coming off this log, Wish I could say I stayed dry, but I got wet:D

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Well there it is, now I'll seal it up and hope it don't crack on me! :eek:

I'm sure happy about a few things, for one, my lathe will go down to 100 RPM, and with a chunk like this, that is nice to have for the first few good whacks! Second, the stand I build was ROCK SOLID, even when things were not really round, I could crank up the speed a bit and it did not even sort of kind of wiggle around.

Lastly, I had the right tools, the roughing gouge was really good for this, and making it sharp several times made it cut nice and smooth as well.

All in all fun, but man do I have a lot of chips to clean up, those garbage guys just hate me, I'll have to buy them a case of beer somewhere!

Cheers!

Now I got to build a hollowing captured rig and make some hollowing tools! :rolleyes:
 
man do I have a lot of chips to clean up, those garbage guys just hate me, I'll have to buy them a case of beer somewhere!

Yeah, yeah, and it's not like you know anyplace where you can buy that. At a discount even. :rolleyes:

Doesn't a building like yours use bins/dumpsters for garbage? It is seven floors high after all!! :huh:
 
Why didn't you go ahead and hollow it? If you did I can't tell. Seems that the hollow form would dry much faster and have less of a chance to crack/split.

The pic with the drop on the lamp looks very "professional". You Take much better pictures than me.
 
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