Turning It Around

or: "The Case For Heresy"

this post is one in long series about the same bowl. instead of linking the others i added the tag "#bigredcedarbowl2" to them, so you can search that and catch up if you want.

in the last post i began taking the piece's outside dimension in, chasing down faults in the wood. i lost almost 3 inches of the bowl's total diameter to this. the bowl i'll be left with could stack inside the one i had to carve away.

i tried not to think about that as i slivered away all that gorgeous old growth cedar. such a waste. it's my own fault for mortgaging my control of this project to the soft-minded majority of my instagram followers. that story is in one of the early posts if you want to read about it, and i intend to write/draw up the reasons why the other choice was correct/would have yielded a bigger, stronger and more beautiful bowl. anyway.

i decided that the risk was balanced enough (read: i couldn't bear to keep cutting anymore) and proceeded with hollowing.

It ought to be said that i take full responsibility for whatever happens in my shop, and that nobody should ever do anything that i do or use any techniques that i use. i'm not an example to follow.

relatedly; if you wanna mislive your life/create derivative work then one good way to do that is imitation

my setup isn't really kitted to turn pieces as large as the one in question. here's some jargon that'll help explain why that is and how i compensate: a lathe's swing is the distance from the center of the powerhead (the part that does the spinning with the motor in it) to the top of the bed (the rail-looking thing extending from the right of the powerhead in all the photos).

my lathe has a swing of (i think) 8 inches. that means that i can turn a piece inboard (in line with/over the bed) that is as wide as 16 inches at its widest point, or 8 inches from its center. if the piece is any wider, then it won't fit. if it won't fit, then you're out of luck. or it has to be turned outboard.

the reason i bought this machine was because the powerhead would swivel and allow me to do just that. when i turn the head 90 degrees, the lathe's swing goes from 8 inches to close to 36 since now it's measured from the center of the powerhead to the concrete floor it's bolted to. that means i could (theoretically) turn a piece that's 72 inches across.

you remember that part in indiana jones where that muscle guy turns around and gets chopped up by the propeller of that runaway airplane? i like pushing boundaries and taking risks, but i don't have a death wish, so i'm not about to turn something as wide as i am tall.

another thing i don't have is a freestanding tool rest. this is a necessary piece if you want to turn a piece outboard-like and use traditional chisels. freestanding tool rests look kinda like those things at the end of a rail line that stop trains. they cost a lot of money to buy, so my plan is to diy one together in the near future (maybe i'll write another fucking novel about that project, too) but for now i have constraints. so i use heresy.

puritans weep when they learn of these, the depths of my depravity on shameless display in the fourth image: i use an angle grinder with a turboplane on it to quickly remove bulk. powercarving erases material and puts very little stress on the piece or its connection to the lathe by transferring most of that stress onto the turner's body. mine's in constant tension to keep the thing still. i have to wear big welding gloves because the chips it throws are heavy and fast enough to break uncovered skin. and, as always, i'm in a full face shield and filters.

as with all things, it's a tradeoff. the work is neither as round nor as clean as it could be with traditional chisels on a toolrest. the possibility of kickback is a little higher than using the grinder on a bolted down stationary piece, but once you learn to ride the competing spins of the lathe's motor and the one in your hands it's pretty easy.

if you weigh kickback risks against those of the (very heavy) piece being dislodged from the chuck at speed by an errant movement of a chisel, i think you could come down on either side of the issue and be within reach of ambivalence. see the italicized text below the fold.

but, if you follow the grinder up with traditional chisels then a) there's no lasting impact on the roundness of the form or the cleanliness of the surface and b) by the time you're touching an immovable lever/blade to a spinning object, that object weighs about 40% less than it might've if you started hollowing traditionally.

i promise we're on the home stretch for this project. maybe two or three more posts.

more later. thanks for reading.

-AW

already off to a good start. cranking Converge's latest album (which just happened to show up in my music library recently) and sippin' some good-ass coffee.

we've gotta finalize this build script and slap together some terraform. should be interesting and extremely easy, as I am a genius.

let's kick this thing

had some azure related stability issues that I believe I've successfully killed. didn't look at IAC at all but it turned out I needed to take some notes for mypresentationbecause it's tonighti need to learn enough terraform to finish my infrastructure script by EOD tomorrow so i'm like a little bit fuckin stressed but i believe in myself dammit

had some azure related stability issues that I believe I've successfully killed. didn't look at IAC at all but it turned out I needed to take some notes for my

presentation

because it's tonight

i need to learn enough terraform to finish my infrastructure script by EOD tomorrow so i'm like a little bit fuckin stressed but i believe in myself dammit