although i use sharp tools and sand carefully with consecutive grit discs i always seem to get wayyy too much tear out with box elder and some other softer woods,i have seen plenty of softwood hollow forms etc. that are drop dead gorgeous,with no tearout whatsoever..what am i doing wrong?
Hiya Tom. You must have been typing your post the same time i was sending you an email - scary huh. If you want I will ask one of my customers what he does. I don't know if he will tell me he is very successful and makes his grits turning. Super nice guy but he does guard his secrets. Worth a try I guess.
Have you posted any recent projects?
Edit: After posting I thought I might as well give you someting to drool over. Here is his first work from one of the logs he got from me. It was the short log I threw in on top of the pallet of longer logs he got. Of course the freebie I tossed on top for him was the one he chose to put in his most recent show. ;)
As he said "You will either love it or hate it." I did not like right away but it grew on me. I told him I would have name it "Beautiful Collision" because my first thought was that the contrasting woods collided. But it did grow on me. I do not think he liked it terribly much although he never said as much. His name is Phil English. I am posting this not only for inspiration but because I wanted you to know that you *can* turn boxelder to mighty thin thicknesses. He turns all his big vases down to as thin as 1/8" - he is pretty amazing really. Check out his site and you can see this piece was a total departure even for him. www.artfromthelathe.com
(https://forestryforum.com/gallery/albums/userpics/12394/Beautiful_CollisonFF.jpg)
You know what I see in that piece? It's a bit different than what resulted. What I see in that piece is a carved bittern or heron-like bird. ;D
You aren't alone. Someone else has said it looked like a big bird looking upward. Another guy said he liked it but to him it looked like a clarinet on top of a bowling pin. That one cracked me up.
What type of grind do you have on your gouge? Do you shear scrape after getting the basic shape? I learned to use a flat shear scraper when I took a class from John Jordan, but I usually lay over the gouge and drop the handle way down. If the curl coming off the Irish grind (Ellsworth grind) while shear scraping is bigger than a 1/16" diameter, I ease up on the pressure. Just keep enough pressure on the gouge to keep it from bouncing and that should cut off alot of tear out.
ty 48 i'll give that a shot..sounds reasonable....texas..how tall is that piece? i regularly turn my hats to 3/32" so i can relate
Tom, the overall height is 48"
I've done a bit of turning ever since i bought an old cast iron lathe for $60 at auction 25-30 years ago. It fell out of the truck when I went around a corner and only bent a handle!
Anyway, I'm getting into some bowls as turning blanks seem a natural side effect of slab wood, right? And I'm rereading all my Fine Woodworking mags and the pretty much agree that scraping equals tearout.
They also go on an on about riding the bevel of shallower cutting angles, etc.
It's funny how you can read an article you read years ago but now that you're interested in the topic there's a whole lot more information in it! :)