he weekend of the 1st and 2nd December

Chapter 03 Weekending 1st and 2nd December Purchased some End Seal for preventing green wood from drying out to quickly and splitting. Also purchased a revolving centre for my lathe, this will hopefully put less strain in the lathe when turning between centres and stop the squeals coming from the tailstock end of the piece I am turning when the wood is dry. Early on Saturday I attacked some pieces of wood from our firewood box. These were logs split in halves and quarters that had a nice straight reasonably tight grain. The first one or two I marked our a rough circle on the ends and attacked them with my handsaw to reduce the amount of work to be done with my large roughing out gouge on the lathe. I then turned these down to cylindrical shapes about 8 inches long and about 3 inches in diameter. I found that my arms were getting rather tired hand sawing the corners. Then decided to mark centres on each of the ends of the wood using a compass and then putting them straight on the lathe. Some of the pieces caused the lathe to vibrate quite a bit. I reduced the speed of the lathe and quickly got started on roughing out cylinders. Once I'd finished 8 of these I took out a paintbrush and applied 2 coats of my end seal. Hopefully this will prevent the pieces splitting. The last piece I turned to shape was from half a log. I marked out a circle on the flat surface and used the handsaw to remove the corners. That is to remove the yellow bits on each corner of the log (see below) by making a cut perpendicular to the top and end up with an eight sided cylinder flat on one end and rounded (the natural bark surface) on the other).

I then put the cylinder in the lathe between centres and turned a recess to take my expansion jaws as well as rounding the outside of the piece. More by good luck than good planning I ended up with the recess having the correct recess. I then inserted the expansion jaws and attached it to the lathe and turned the outside to the shape I required. Used a parting tool to remove the end that I was going to use as the lid. This piece still had some of the bark left on it and I decided to leave it like that to provide a slightly different finish. I then used the deep bowl gouge to remove the inside of the bowl. Used some coarse sandpaper to smooth the inside and outside a bit and then left it to dry out a bit. I realised that turning bowls from half logs and the like was hard work when you use a handsaw to rough shape the wood.