Short day

Yesterday, I finished these:

They are little boxes my dad designed, about 2.5″ wide, with the lids I learned the very basics of wood-turning on. The knobs are cast and then trimmed on the lathe, and then I put a little maple leaf on some. Basically, if the knob looked really good after I  trimmed it, I left it plain. If it looked less than perfect, I soldered a little maple leaf on the top.

I cut the post to the right length.

Then I very gently hammered the edges of post flat, so that the knob will never come out of that hole again.

Successes

I may have seemed a little whiny in that last post. But I didn’t want to give the impression that this is just all easy, or that it is just this steady climb towards success. There are ups and downs, and last week was kind of a down. So I figured today I’ll tell you about a couple successes. A little while ago, I tried spinning the pieces for a large candleholder. I managed a couple, but then popped the bottom off two in a row, which was frustrating, so my dad offered to spin the rest of them.

Please note that there are THREE spun tops here with their bottoms popped off.

I would suspect him of trying to make me feel better, and except (thankfully), he’s not the sort of person who would coddle me that way. I actually love spinning. It feels kind of powerful to take a piece of metal and so quickly form a shape out of it. And I am improving. I spun the outer pieces and inner pieces for this candle holder.

Candleholder waiting to be buffed all shiny.

The first time I spun the outer piece, it was surprisingly difficult to get one ridge formed properly. By the 6th and final one, it was a breeze. I can’t figure out how it goes from feeling impossibly awkward to easy, just like that. My father not only does not coddle me, he appears to have great faith in my nascent abilities. Back when we first started, he showed me how to spin porringer bowls, which involves rolling the lip of the bowl at the end. (This adds strength to the bowl so it isn’t as easy to dent out of shape during use, which is important with such a soft metal.) I wasn’t very successful at that part. I wasn’t so successful at any of it, really, but it was the first thing I tried to spin. Nevertheless, when he was going to be away for the afternoon, he suggested I spin some more, and left me to it. I confess to thinking him a wee bit nuts, but I do know the basics of spinning and it is a small bowl, so really, how hard could it be?

Not yet a bowl

Hey, bowl shaped! Trimming the edge before rolling the lip.

Not hard at all, actually. Even rolling the lip, something I am not sure I did successful at all last time, was quite easy. I was ridiculously pleased with myself.

Rolled lip!

A couple of days ago, he and my mother were going out, so he suggested I could try making the lids for some round boxes he’d spun. Wooden lids. Would you like to know the last time I tried turning wood on the lathe? Never, that’s when. But he handed me this:

And told me to turn it into this:

Then he left. And I did. Even more fun, because the piece of wood was thicker, I got to taper the top as well.

Turning wood is fun, although the sawdust isn’t. Now, this is pretty simple stuff, but still, it is simple stuff I didn’t know how to do before, and now I do.

You Spin Me Right Round, Baby

So, more about spinning, as requested by Amy.

A lathe is a machine that spins stuff very quickly. Is that too simplistic a place to start? My father has all kinds of wooden shapes he has created (and some he inherited from his mentor, Doug Shenstone), called chucks. They are either hanging on the wall behind the lathe, or piled up on shelves beside that area.

The lathe and chucks hanging behind it.

More chucks!

This is how they are organized: my dad sometimes remembers where he put the one he wants. He does, thankfully, write what each one is for on the chuck itself. Once I can actually read his handwriting, that will be very helpful. (Okay, to be fair, he’s started labelling each one legibly now, just for me!)

To spin something, we afix the correct chuck to one end of the lathe, puts a smaller wooden piece on the other end and tighten a metal disc between the two.

Here’s a plate-shaped chuck:

Here’s the resulting plate, partially planished. My dad did this. I’m not at this point yet.

We grease the metal with beeswax (which, as a bonus, smells nice) and then use either a metal or wooden spinning tool to push the metal into the shape of the chuck.

In the above photo, my father is using a metal spinning tool in his right hand to push the pewter against the chuck. The wooden stick in his left hand is used to provide counter-pressure and stop the metal from warping. The tricky part with spinning is to press hard enough to move the metal, but not so hard that gets too thin and snaps, or that it starts warping.

Here’s a successfully spun cup and an unsuccessfully spun one with a tear in the metal where it got too thin. Below is an even bigger fail, where the lathe likely wasn’t tight enough and the metal disc became uncentered. Both of these are my screw-ups, in case that isn’t glaringly obvious. The dark streaks are grease.

Here’s a photo of my father half-way though spinning the same type of cup successfully. At this point, he no longer needs the stick in his left hand for counter-pressure and just moves the spinning tool back and forth to move the metal.

Once the pewter is in the shape of the chuck, we trim it with a chisel.

That can be fun because it sometimes causes pewter streamers to fly everywhere, resulting in whomever is spinning looking a bit like a christmas tree with tinsel hanging everywhere.

Pewter trimmings hanging off the lathe

So, them’s the basics. The basics are all I’ve gotten anywhere near mastering. My father does far more complicated things I have not yet tackled, like using multiple chucks to produce vases with thin necks. And, the bigger the piece of metal, the harder it is to spin, so I’m still only successful with the smaller stuff. 

Spinning Sucks

Well, my spinning sucks, anyway. My father makes it look easy.

I wrote those to lines about a week ago, and life then just got in the way, a lot. Now only some of my spinning sucks. Nice to see there’s progress.

My dad demonstrated either a lot of faith in my ability to pick this stuff up, or was just not thinking things through, and started me on big things. Wait, I’m going to back up a bit. Here’s how you spin something:

Everything we spin has to start as a circle. My father has written down on cue cards how big the circle of pewter needs to be depending on the object to be made. Just to make it fun, sometimes he writes down the radius and sometimes he writes down the diameter, and sometimes he doesn’t indicate which one it is that he’s written down. And usually his handwriting is illegible. Thankfully, that hasn’t been an issue so far, as he looks it up and just tells me. I measure out the radius on one of these useful pointy mathy things:

Drawing a circle

Then I cut out the circles, using either the scroll saw or a hand saw, depending on my mood and the size of the piece of metal.

My dad has wooden chucks of different shapes. Affix the right one on the lathe and use a smaller one to screw the metal in tight. The first step at this point is to turn the lathe on and use wooden stick to press against the spinning disc while it isn’t tight, in order to center it. My father just leaves it loose, turns on the lathe, centers the metal and then tightens it the lathe. I tighten the lathe, turn it on, then loosen it, etc., because I am convinced that otherwise the metal disc will go flying off and maim me. This not a random fear. See the gouge in the wall? My dad did that, not me.

This is way high up on the wall opposite the lathe.

Fortunately, the wall is the only thing that was ever maimed, and only once, and we wear face shields to protect our pretty pretty faces.

See all the wooden chucks on the wall?

Next, we use either wooden or metal sticks to press the metal up against the wooden chuck.

The stick in the left hand is for counter pressure.

Pewter is a soft metal, so you’d think this would be easy, but it is so soft that you can fairly easily press too hard and cause the metal to tear apart.

Like this!

This is NOT how it is supposed to look.

This is wrecked. I have messed up spinning in less bad ways – rippling the metal and such – and my father has managed to fix those.

Fixing my mistake.

But after several of these experiences, I suggested that perhaps we should just start me on smaller items. That’s when things got better.

That will be the next post.