Not much time spent in the workshop today. I roughed out another bowl from one of the blocks of yew left over from a few days ago. This one is smaller than the others, only about seven inches in diameter, and has a bit more of the orange colour normally seen in yew heartwood. The bandsaw blade is blunt, and would not cut straight. With the blank on a small faceplate, it was very crooked. The outcome from this would have been that the bowl was shallower than it needed to be. My solution, which I used for the others in this batch too, was to put a wooden wedge under one side of the faceplate to true it up. I made sure that one of the fixing screws went through the wedge to keep it safely in place.
I also cut a block to size for a friend at my local club. He wants to make a finial for a newel post and needed a large block cut to a cylinder as he doesn’t have a bandsaw. It was a glue-up from sections of reclaimed softwood joists, and will be fine when painted.
It was woodturning club night tonight. No special event was organised, just a group of woodturners doing the usual show-and-tell. I took my ornamental-turned square teak bowl that I have written about before and it sparked some interest. Ian suggested that the decoration could have been made with a hole saw instead of the fly cutter I used, but it would still need some indexing arrangement to get the spacing right, and a way to control the depth of cut. Other people brought some wooden whistles, and a very nice small laburnum bowl of very simple design.