To Everything, Turn…Turn…Turn

I chucked up one of the Maple Offcuts from Lee Valley this morning.  Wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I started.  I was just winging it.  I really wanted to work with some of the other tools, to try and see how they cut, and what kind of technique to apply.

I tried:

Large roughing gouge

Small roughing gouge

Parting tool (for the rings)

Fingernail gouge

Scraper (round nose) and

Skew (both large and small)

For a first attempt at captive rings, I was quite pleased, especially because I don’t have a ring chisel.  The difficulty came when I started shaping the goblet.  I kept catching the tools.

There are 2 very important concepts when approaching a piece of wood that is spinning toward you at a couple thousand rpms.  The first is to “Ride the bevel”  What this means is you don’t let the cutting edge of your gouge touch the wood first.  You place the gouge on the wood so that the bevel rides on the wood and then you slowly pull the angle back until the cutter starts cutting.  The 2nd concept is, “always cut downhill”.  What I believe this means is you move the gouge from the bigger part towards the smaller part.  In the case of the goblet, I move from the wider part of the glass down towards the stem.  The problem that I was having was that my tools kept catching at the transition points.  In one of these pictures you can clearly see a catch just to the left of the rings.  After several tools and multiple attempts to smooth this out, I finally had to step away from it and take a break.  Perhaps one of the forums that I am a member of can guide me in the right direction.

I don’t have all of the required equipment to finish the goblet (i.e. I need a scroll chuck so that I can pull back the tailstock to hollow the bowl, but until I get the chuck, I won’t be able to finish a bowl of this type.