Chess set

My daughter has been asking me for a long time (about four years) to turn her a chess set. I have never been very keen as I considered it to be boring and spindle turning is not one of my strong points. I realised that the only possibility would be to do it during my holiday. Anyway the 16 pawns are finished, my spindle gouge and skew skills are busy improving with every piece. The wood is Maple for the light pieces and Wallnut for the dark pieces, sanded to 600 grit, finished with three coats of Woodoc 5 to bring out the colour and wood grain. Finally it is polished with Atique wax.

Holiday projects

This year I decided to take my Nova lathe with me to my holiday home at Jongensfontein. The plan is to leave it there so that I can do some turning during my holidays. I left with quite a load on my Toyota bakkie, lathe, tools, wood, etc.on the 1400 km journey. I slept over in Beaufort West and left at 5 AM for the last part of my journey where I photographed the sunrise with my Iphone, absolutely beautiful.

Next was to unload, assemble and organise the garage as my workshop

In the next post I will give more detail on my holiday project

New lathe: Jet 1221VS

The new Jet 1221VS midi lathe just arrived in South Africa and I have been looking for a while for a lathe that I can use for demonstration purposes. After evaluating the lathe at the Hardware Center open day, I was impressed with this lathe and one week later had one of them in my workshop. Unfortunately the lathe came with a M33 spindle where my other lathes are 1 and 1/4 but I fitted a M33 to 1" adaptor and then my Nova chuck with a 1" insert. Not optimum but the best I could do for now, later I may get myself a chuck directly threaded for M33. I turned some Jacaranda bowls to test the lathe and was satisfied with my purchase.

Another piece from Mountain Karee

Last week I started on a fairly big piece of Mountain Karee, which will now take some time to dry before I can do some decorative work and finish the piece. It also gives me some time to develop some ideas on what decoration I will do. I still have some of the Mountain Karee (Bergkaree in Afrikaans) left and this week I chose a healthy piece and made an endgrain hollow form. Two ago years while in Paris, I got hold of a book of the well known French potter, Robert Deblander, who managed a good balance between form and graphic decoration. I still want to explore some of his ideas on graphic decoration, using the techniques I learned from Nick Agar during my course with him but this week I am using one of his ideas on shape for a hollow form. As woodturners we can learn a lot about shape, looking at shapes coming from pottery, ceramics and glass.

My photograpy is still not great, this picture taken with my Iphone, but in the new year I will work on this. The sapwood of the Bergkaree is very light but with some interesting small burls which should give it some charater. The top and bottom where the heartwood is visible should give a nice deep red finish once it is dry.

The piece is 24cm high by 23cm diameter and currently weighs 1,5kg. I will also now leave it to dry and then decide whether I will do any decoration or just simply sand and finish. Hollowing was done with my Woodcut tools but for the last section the 5/8 shaft of the Woodcut was not sufficient so I had to use my 3/4 inch John Jordan hollowing. Wall thickness is about 5 to 6 mm

Back again

I have not been posting anything for quite a while and decided to add some of my latest pieces I am working on. I also updated my portfolio with some of my work I have done in 2013, so have a look if you are interested. As quite often happens, we had a big thunderstorm at the beginning of summer in Pretoria and the strong wind uprooted a 'Bergkaree' (Mountain Karee) tree at the place at the place where I work. I took the opportunity to start on a fairly large piece coming from a place where the trunk was already quite rotten. The idea is to see if I can get some special effects from the rotten wood. At the same time I am testing the capacity of my Stubby lathe.

The biggest test for me was however getting the piece of wood single handed mounted on the lathe without a hoist. Adding a hoist to my workshop will have to be one of my next projects. Unfortunately I did not weigh the blank before starting to work on it but I guess it must have been over 30kg, maybe closer to 40kg. It was turned and hollowed and still weighed 7,5kg, measuring 44cm diameter by 26 cm high.

The rotten areas can be seen but I will leave it now to dry before creating some special effects on these areas. For interest sake a photo after completion of the turnning to see all the shavings