Back to the drawing board

The club challenge for October in inside-out. I had an idea to incorporate my multi axis turning on the inside face. So I chucked up a piece of Home Depot redwood and turned a prototype.















I had to leave the ends square so I had some area to glue once its turned inside out. Normally I would turn all the way to the ends of the blank. Because this is only a prototype I didn't do the preliminary glue up.














Instead i turned it as a solid piece and then quartered it on my band saw before turning the sections inside out. The results weren't what I had in mind so it went in the recycling bin and I went back to the drawing board.














My second idea was more successful and closer to what I had in mind as my concept. I started by gluing 4 pieces together with a paper joint and turning a wide cove.











The paper glue joints were the split apart and the 4 pieces turned inside out and glued together permanently. I opted to turn on 4 axes with a 90 degree twist to match the 4 diamond shaped openings formed by the inside-out process.









It's not perfect but it proves the concept. The glue joints could be much better; that's one of the reasons I'm not a segmented turner. I'm also not sure how this concept could be incorporated into a finished piece. For now I'm just happy that I was able to get my proof of concept done.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Day 335: Testing texture

You may recognize these 3 hollow forms from yesterday.  Today they were hollowed and then textured.

The piece on the right was an experiment, I intentionally cut some grooves on the inside so that they would open up and show through as voids when the piece was textured.  I think there's potential here.  The middle piece was turned with the grain at a slight angle.  I'll probably do another one with the grain running closer to 45 degrees.  The piece on the right has the grain running horizontally and is the most successful of the 3 in my opinion.

Day 334: Dog days

The dog days of summer are upon us here in the Phoenix area.  That means a couple of things, 1) my shop time is limited because of the extreme heat, 110+ is not uncommon,  and 2)  my shop time is limited due to my other hobby: storm chasing.  Phoenix gets hit with monsoon storms every year, they typically run from mid July through the end of August.  Storms typically build over the the Mogollon rim and then sweep to the Southwest into the Phoenix metro area (also called the valley of the sun).  We live on the eastern edge of the valley, not far from the Superstition Mountains and get some of the best lightning in the state.

My shop time today consisted of cutting and roughing 4 small piece of redwood.  3 of them will be small hollow forms that I plan to texture; the fourth will be a spline joined lidded box that will also be textured.  The hollow forms all have the grain running in different directions.  The one on the left has the grain running vertically, the middle is running at a slight angle, and the one on the right has the grain running across the piece.  

Tonight we had the first big storm of the monsoon season.  There was a smaller storm on Friday evening but it died out before it got to me.  I'm sorting through 139 images I took tonight.  If I'm lucky I'll have 2 or 3 keepers.  A really good night would 5 or 6 keepers.