In My "Spare" Time: Year 19, Week 18, Day One (week 1008)

Year 19, Week 18, Day One (week 1008)
(January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.)
05-11-19 Saturday

85 degrees with 72% humidity Light clouds and mostly blue sky. Clouds built up over the Everglades but never came over to us as predicted other than the high thin shield cloud from the storms. This weather report is brought to you By The Pompano Beach Department Of Tourism.

We have a wood turning club meeting this week so I decided to work to get the tea pot close to finish this weekend.

Mom is reducing the size of her library. We took mom’s books to the Deerfield public library. They took all the art books but not the encyclopedias. We took the rest of the books to Goodwill and they took them happily. They were a lot of work. I had to get into the bed of the truck to reach some of the boxes that slid forward and that was not easy for me. I am not great at getting up off the floor and when you get into the bed of the truck, it is like getting up off the floor. Mom was happy they were gone and I am happy they are going for good use. I don’t like seeing books simply trashed.

We did see two yard sales. It was one of Mom’s friends and they were selling for a church. I picked up a machine caliper (measuring a hundredth of an inch). I will give that to my brother.
At the other yard sale I got another of those wooden folding coffee tables. You really never have enough of those..... until you have too many....

Mom has problems getting into and out of my truck at the different stops. It is a bit high and hard on her shoulder to get up there. I have to locate the folding steps I had for getting in and out of. It might be in the truck but buried. If it isn’t there, it could be one of ten other locations. She will think twice about riding with me until I get that step.

I made good headway on my tea pot. The first tenon I made was not substantial enough and the vase popped off the chuck four times. Then I made a stronger tenon and finished hollowing it out. It could be hollowed for a thinner wall but I was not going to test my luck today. I bopped my fingers several times doing many things (hit lightly with a slip of carving knife, lathe tool, touched the spinning spout, etc), no damage, and decided I was not quite ready to handle something really challenging. I mounted the wood for the lid on the lathe and it came off and that was when I decided I was wore out enough and packed up. I should be able to do the lid quickly tomorrow. I did a lot of sanding on the vase but it needs more. Not spectacular. I made many mistakes but it is made and is quite passable. The next one should not have near as many mistakes in it.

We had the pulled pork for lunch today. I made this with pork shoulder chucks cut for stews. I walked past it in the store, then found myself next to it again and it leaped into my basket and refused to get out. Pork shoulder does make better pulled pork than pork loin. It will be a long while before I make pulled pork again. Surprisingly, the sauce it is cooked in does not import a lot of flavor. One would expect it to be “dripping” in the flavor of the sauce. Mom did like me providing part of the lunch.

I was thinking about the feet I made for my four footed canes. I turned them on the lathe and had some problems with it as the peg to hold them in place was not tight enough. I then stuck one of my bowl gouges into the hole of the foot and rotated it on the disk sander to correct the shape. After I was done, it dawned on me that I could have simply drilled the hole the feet go into and rotated the piece of wood on the disk sander and had the same effect.
We have to remember that there is always more than one way to do anything. I have seen bowls made using chisels, table saws, drills, grinders, just to name a few methods that are not with a lathe. Some methods might actually be easier than others for what you are doing. Generally, we are focused on the methods we have at hand. I have a lathe and know how to do it, so my first thought is on how to spin something. I use a knife and dremmel and think of ways to remove wood. Someone who does not have those tools might look at another method to do the same thing and get very nice results.
The use of a sander might remove wood faster and easier than a lathe. A bandsaw can be used to simplify many shapes before other tools are looked at. One might build something up from pieces as glue-ups rather than remove a lot of wood from a large block.
I am not a purist. In Austria, they have their carvers certify that no power tools was used in carving something. I will use a bandsaw, saws-all, dremmel, knives, sanders, chisels and even lathe to remove wood for a carving. If you “think outside the box” you can find solutions to make your life easier. Because of this, next time I make feet for one of the canes, I might not even uncover the lathe to make them.
I see videos of where guys will make all sorts of tools with the simplest methods. For power, they will use angle grinders, drills, or rescued motors. The use of wood or welded metal, they make new tools from scratch. I’ve seen plywood drill presses, table saws run by drills, circular saws, angle grinders. I’ve seen where guys will build a frame and stick a table size slab of wood and use a router to level the surface. There is always a way to make something to do something else that is needed, and there is always an alternative method to do something.

I had some tear out on the outside of the bowl of the tea pot where it created some holes. I worked some glue into the holes then grabbed sawdust that was still on the lathe and forced them into the glue. I let it dry a while, then sanded the spots, then did it again. They just look like parts of the wood. If you don’t know they are there, you will never see them. I had some difficulty finding them to glue more sawdust on them the second time.

Several months ago, someone in my turning club modified their cast iron tool rest by attaching a rod along the top. The rods are less likely to chip or dent. I asked him how he did it and he used J.B. WELD and a rod, and he ground a groove for the rod to sit in. I have a rod that is about the right size.
I put the rod on the edge of the tool rest and was shocked. The tool rest is bowed, higher on the sides than the center. Last week, when I had put this to the grinder, I saw a gap and thought the wood disk had bowed. I learned the sanding disk is fairly straight. The front of the tool rest is straight (which is what I used to flatten the disk in the first place), but the top is not.
Now I could grind metal away, or bend the rod to fit the curve, or have my brother machine it. I am now wondering if that effected my tool use as, the tool rest height is set based on where the center of the cutting edge lines up with the center of the work. I am wondering if a slight difference in height would mess up how the tool will cut the wood. Of course, as sloppy as my skills are, that amount of error would not show up for the most part. Tip the handle up or down and that difference is gone.

I will finish the lid tomorrow and see what else I do.

Year 19, Week 18, Day Two (week 1008)
(January 17, 2000 was my first carving day.)
05-12-19 Sunday

Blue sky most of the morning, nice breeze 62% humidity which is more livable than yesterday, the evening storms appeared at the edge of the Everglades after two and crossed to the ocean after four. Mom’s plants were watered nicely, though I do not know if it was as much as she likes. This weather report is brought to you by The City Of Pompano Beach Department Of Tourism.

I found out last night that a HARBOR FREIGHT store opened nearby. There used to be a Gordon Food Supply store nearby but they closed it last year. That store is now a Harbor Freight. Is it too soon to get a warehouse to store my future tool purchases or should I wait a little bit? I no longer have to make plans to stop there. It can be more of a spur of the moment thing now.

I visited two yard sales. One was mom’s friend from yesterday. I picked up something mom said she almost bought. Later in the day yesterday, the tools they had were cleaned out.
I then found another yard sale from someone I know and picked up a few things. He tried to give them to me but I gave him something. Both days I could have gotten more knives. I don’t need more knives.
There are what many people refer to as dealers who hit the yard sales early. They buy lots of stuff at a super low price so they can resell it. A visit from one or two of them can make one’s day. If you are behind them, you don’t get much selection but that does not matter as you are only choosing from what they have left anyway.

I thinned out the interior of the tea pot a little more. Not really much was removed, it was more that I “tried” to remove a little more weight. It is heavier than it should be.
I then mounted the block of wood for the lid in the lathe and removed most of the diameter, then worked to fit the lid to the vase, cutting the end on an angle and holding the vase to it, using friction to burn-mark the diameter, while it was spinning to see how it fits, then cutting some more until it slid in the hole.
I learned that the sides of the hole was not cut straight down, but more on an angle. That complicated the cut I was doing. Once I had some form of a fit, I took the lid off and remounted the tea pot in the chuck. I then put the lid on and held the lid in place with the tail stock. I then started removing wood and shaping the lid so the top would have a handle and tried to get the edges to match the shape of the vase.
This is where my mistakes really started showing. For one thing, the ball of the tea pot was not really round. It was slightly oval. Then when I mounted the tea pot to make the tenon to hollow it, I made no attempt at centering it on the ball. I hollowed it out and the mistakes were obvious. When I tried to match the lid to the shape of the vase, some edge of the lid was higher than the opposite edge. Part way though, I rotated the lid in an attempt to make it even. I should have left it were it was so one spot would match fairly well.
The lid does not fit perfectly, but it sits in there. The coloration pattern of the lid does not match the body of the vase. The lid is end grain rather than side grain. I will have to give more thought into where the lid comes from on the block of wood. One idea is to partially shape the piece, then cut a cone out of the wood where the lid will sit, then finish the body while trying to ignore the hole, and then finish the lid after it is hollowed. That way the lid would have some chance of matching the grain and color structure of the pot. I could use a different wood altogether. I have other possibilities to consider and will give it thought before I do the next one.
I chose not to add a finish to the piece. It really needs sanding, which I was not ready to do yet. I will just take it with me raw to show in the turning club meeting. It helps to tell what you did wrong, along with what you did right. It gives others ideas and warns them of things to look for.

I gave my brother the caliper I picked up yesterday.. He looked it over carefully. It is pretty good. He then explained to me that they come in different types of scale, different levels of accuracy, along with different constructions. If all your work is in fractions of inches, metric or decimal inches are not much help. The one I gave him was in decimal inches and looks like it will do half a hundredth of an inch accuracy. Most of his work is in fractions right now.
He reminded me that I have the machine lathe that I can make things on. I’ve been more interested in making sawdust rather than metal bits. You cannot do them at the same time and they require a different mind set. What I could really use are some different designed points for the tail stock. I have interchangeable points, but a few disappeared. There are others that would be quite useful and the machine lathe would do the job of making them nicely. That would increase my capability by quite a bit. My brother made a tool rest that can move the bit on an angle and that is exactly what is needed for some of the parts I want to make such as cones.

When I got home, I made some ice cream. I use bananas as the base rather than cream, and then add some other fruit. The banana flavor ends up disappearing. Mom gave me some mangos she cut up from her neighbor’s tree. They are not fully ripe, but ripe enough to eat. I mixed the bananas and the mangos together about equal in proportion. I only made a small batch as I was not sure how it would come out. Not bad. No banana flavor. It could be sweeter than it is, but not too bad. I usually eat it like a popsicle rather as a soft ice cream which would be better. I use the food processor to cream the fruit, then pour it out on a lined sheet pan and pop that into the freezer to set. When it is frozen, I cut it into bite sized squares. I have to remember to try do to a chocolate version next time and see how that comes out.
The beauty of this banana ice cream is that it is great for people who are lactose intolerant. It is not hard to make. With some effort, you could use a blender or a fork to mash it if you don’t have a food processor. Since you are just using fruit, it is healthy.

I will see what happens next week.

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