Once again we had the services of the multi talented Kristian Doherty to give the demonstration for our May meeting and what a very interesting demonstration it turned out to be. Kristian brought along an ornamental lathe which he had built himself and I have to say it, I had never seen one before but then I am not too long at this woodturning lark, so for the benefit of any of you guys who are likewise I will do my best to describe its workings and exactly what it does. First of all it differs from the standard lathe which spins between centres and is worked with hand held tools, the ornamental lathe has cutters which rotate at high speed and moves in different ways across the face of the workpiece. The workpiece, held in a chuck also rotates but at a much lower speed, 10rpm in this instance. Kristian ran us through the history and the many ways this lathe can be used with a standard lathe as in turning Chinese balls, spheres within cubes, and many weird and wonderful sculptures.
Kristian then went on to give a practical demonstration by showing how it can be used to decorate preturned pieces like lids and sides of boxes and here I am going to rely heavily on photos to show the different designs and motifs it carves. For these pieces he used hardwoods like, Bacote, Ironwood and African blackwood.
As for building the lathe itself Kristian described in detail how he went about this, all the problems he encountered and the solutions he found, actually it is still a work in progress. Thank you very much Kristian for your very interesting demo, I know my few words trying to describe it don’t do it justice.
Now to the competition results, in the senior, 1st Jim Hynes 2nd Tom Murphy and 3rd Kevin Milton and the Junior first went to Frank Trapp. Here a word of apology to Frank, in the spring issue of the journal, page39 a piece attributed to Antony Murphy is in fact by Frank, a gremlin in the works somewhere along the way, sorry Frank.
That’s it for this month except to remind you all to get some of your work into the competitions, both levels, this helps us all to improve our skills and keep the standard up.
Until next month work safe.
Pat Gannon