May in Minnesota means the spring woodturning season is well underway. Days are longer, wood is plentiful, and the woodshop is the perfect temperature, as not much needs to be done at this point to control the heat or humidity. And, if you’ve been following along with us, your shop is tuned up and ready for some serious woodturning!
The question now is whether your skills are as tuned up as your shop. Whether you spent the winter turning or took some time off, there are some practical skills you could practice this month to make sure you’re ready for a summer of woodworking. Read on to learn about three essential skills and woodturning fundamentals to practice this spring.
The first skill to practice this spring is your tool control and presentation. This is especially important because most turning problems start here, especially for beginning woodturners. You might think that you just grab a gouge or chisel, set it to the wood, and beautiful projects will take shape.
However, as anyone who has laid tool to wood knows, things aren’t as easy as they might seem. Each tool requires a different handgrip or angle on the tool rest, and some of these techniques need just the slightest adjustment to take your projects from good to great.
The first skill to practice this month is maintaining your bevel contact, which is also called “riding the bevel.” This skill is essential for creating clean cuts and preventing catches, which makes both the turning experience and the wood surface smoother, cutting down on the time you will need to spend sanding later.
If you’re new to woodturning, you may not be aware of what the bevel of a tool is. According to the Woodworker’s Institute, “the bevel is the angled area of tool after the cutting edge, on the underside of the tool.” Whether you are using a skew chisel, bowl gouge, spindle gouge, or roughing gouge, you will notice that the end of the tool is not flat; there is a tapered edge. On a gouge, this edge is curved, while on a chisel, this edge comes to a point.
When using a tool with a beveled edge, it is important to use that edge to your advantage. If you present the tool to the wood surface head-on, it will cause uneven cutting and catching, creating tear-out and a need for more sanding, possibly even ruining the piece you are working on.
In order to ride the bevel, it’s best to remember the ABC method. First, anchor your tool on the tool rest. Position the tool rest so that it is far enough from the wood blank that the wood blank won’t hit it or the banjo at any point, but close enough that only about an inch or so of the tool extends beyond the tool rest. Your tool should be slightly angled so that the edge of the tool that is touching the wood blank is at or slightly above the center line of the wood blank.
Once your tool is in place, lay the bevel of the tool on the wood. Remember that the bevel is the angled portion of the end of the tool, so you want that portion of the tool to be in contact with the wood before you begin cutting.
Then, lift the handle of the tool just slightly to engage the cutting edge. The bevel can actually be in contact with your wood blank without cutting; the bevel will rub against the wood, but once the sharp or cutting edge is engaged, the tool will begin removing wood from the blank.
Riding the bevel is a difficult and nuanced skill to learn, especially because woodturning involves the creation of rounded objects like bowls. When the wood blank is curved, the beveled edge of the tool needs constant adjustment.
Learning this skill requires practice and persistence. Eventually, it will become intuitive; just as you can probably balance on one foot without thinking about each muscle involved in that action, so an experienced woodturner will adjust his or her tool without much thought.
In order to get to the point of standing on one foot, though, a child must practice walking and balancing, just as a beginning woodturner must practice riding the bevel until it becomes second nature.
Get some spare blanks and practice making cuts with bowl gouges, spindle gouges, roughing gouges, and skew chisels until the motion of maintaining bevel contact becomes effortless. You might be surprised with the new shapes you can make!
Another important but often overlooked skill to practice this spring is reducing vibration during your turning process. Vibration can cause unwanted tool marks, catches, and tear-out in your blanks. Too much vibration can also cause issues with the bearings in your lathe over time.
Reducing vibration starts with making sure your lathe is level. This is usually not a problem if you are working on a floor that is already level, but it might be an issue if your shop has a dirt floor or is in an older building that has settled over the years. To assess if your floor is level, you can take a level and slide it across the floor to look for gaps or humps. You can also use a laser, or even roll a marble across the floor to check if there is a slope.
If the floor is not level, you will need to adjust your table and/or lathe to make sure everything is stable. You can use a pad or piece of wood to fill in gaps beneath table legs or under one corner of your lathe. If you take this route, you will need to ensure that the shim is wedged firmly under the table or lathe leg so that it won’t wiggle free.
If you are fixing the leveling of your workbench or table instead of just the lathe, you might consider attaching a piece of wood to the bottom of table leg or bolting the bench to the wall so that you don’t have to worry about things moving as you work on your wood blanks.
Once you are sure that your table and lathe are level, the next thing to check to reduce vibration in your woodturning is your wood blank. Often, you might start with a large or uneven blank. To reduce vibration, start with low RPMs and remove the edges of the wood blank gradually.
Before you mount the wood blank on the lathe, you might also consider removing the edges or corners of the blank using a saw after you have marked out the size of blank you will need. See our post on How to Turn a Bowl out of Wood for a discussion of how best to center, prepare, and mount a wood blank.
You can also use the tailstock to support the blank for as long as possible. Keeping your tools sharp and riding the bevel will help you cut smoothly as well, reducing the amount of vibration in your turning.
One of the best ways to practice this skill is to take some spare blanks of odd sizes and intentionally mount them so they are slightly off-center. Then, you can practice, in a more-or-less real-world setting, what you might do to correct the issue, whether that is reducing your turning speed, sharpening your tools, or re-centering and re-mounting the blank.
You might try “eyeing it” and mounting the blank without centering it first to check how close you are when you then actually measure and plan your project. This will give you an idea of how good your eye is and how important it is to center and true each blank to ensure consistent work.
A third skill you should practice this spring is sanding. While this is technically not part of turning, the sanding of a piece can actually make the biggest difference between “eh, nice” and “wow!”
The first sanding skill to practice is recognizing when it is time to stop turning and start sanding. As you can guess, this is another difficult technique to learn, one that takes practice and nuance. You are ready to start sanding when your project is the shape you want and you have finished all tool cutting. Make sure you also have removed tool marks and tear-outs as much as possible, and that there are no surface bumps left that stand out.
Once you have decided to begin sanding, turn your lathe speed down and decide whether you are going to use a power sander or sand by hand. This decision will depend on your preference as well as the kind of item you are sanding. Practicing different methods will help you understand which one works best in different situations.
Part of sanding is also knowing what grit to use and when to move to a finer grit. You should always start with an aggressive grit like 80 or 120 to remove tool marks and move progressively finer. You don’t want to skip more than one grit level; if you do, the new sandpaper won’t remove the marks from the previous one.
One thing you can do to help you know when to get a finer grit is the pencil test. Make a continuous pencil mark on your wood-turned item. When you have removed the entire mark, you know that you have removed all the tool marks or grit marks and you are ready to move to the next finer grit level.
It is also important to recognize when your sandpaper is worn out, and you need to get a new piece. If the sandpaper starts to feel smooth or it seems like it is taking longer to remove marks, throw out your piece and get a new one. Keep in mind wearing out sandpaper does not reduce the grit level, so you can’t use an old piece of 320 grit as a 220.
Adjusting the pressure is also important when sanding. Unfortunately, there is no way to quantify exactly how much pressure is needed; this will change with the woodturner and with the piece you are creating. The best thing to remember is that too much pressure will create too much heat and deform the wood. Start with less pressure and apply more as needed.
If you are hand sanding and your fingers are getting hot, that is a good sign that you are applying too much pressure. If you are power sanding, the drill motor should not be straining. If you are applying too much pressure because it seems like the abrasive you are using is not removing marks the way you want it to, it’s probably time to get a new piece of sandpaper.
Lastly, remember that cross-grain scratches will be visible when you apply a finish, so it is important to stop the lathe from time to time and sand locally with the grain to remove the cross-grain marks.
The best thing you can do here is practice sanding different pieces using different methods. Lay in a supply of good quality sandpaper and try out power sanding and hand sanding, moving with and against the grain and with different grits of sandpaper.
While some of these skills might seem tedious to practice, refining your techniques now, on practice pieces, can reduce frustration later when you are making projects to sell or give away.
Spring is the ideal time to perfect your tool control and presentation, lathe and wood blank stabilization, and sanding workflow. Remember, the better your fundamentals feel now, the more creative freedom you’ll have all season!
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