turning – Made by Mikal

madebymikal.com

I’ve been doing a lot more wood work recently, and I decided I wanted to write that up somewhere. Instead of posting it here, I also wanted to play with wordpress as an alternative hosting solution. The wood working is therefore being blogged on a new site, madebymikal.com. So far I’ve made a Thien Baffle cyclonic separator to stop my dust extractor filling with planer shavings, as well as documenting the process of making home made vanilla essence with turned bottle stoppers for Christmas. Oh, and I found a source of cheap high quality bar clamps in Australia.

Not too bad for the week before Christmas I don’t think.

Home made vanilla essence for Christmas

Catherine and I decided to make home made vanilla essence as part of our Christmas gifts for 2014. This turned out to be pretty easy, and result is really good. As part of that I turned bottle stoppers for the little decorative bottles we gave the essence out in. I also needed to explore what glue would work with silicone stoppers, which turned out to be a bit of an adventure.

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Turning for December 2014

I gave out a bunch of bowls at the work Christmas party, and to my embarrassment many people asked what wood and finish had been used. I of course didn’t remember because I made some of them over six months ago. I’m therefore going to try and do a better job of systematically documenting the things I make. This post is a first attempt at that.

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More bowls and pens

The pens are quite hard to make by the way — the wood is only a millimeter or so thick, so it tends to split very easily.

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More turning

Some more pens, and then I went back to bowls for a bit.

The attraction of pens is that I can churn out a pen in about 30 minutes, whereas a bowl can take twice that. Therefore when I have a small chance to play in the garage I’ll do a pen, whereas when I have more time I might do a bowl.

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I’ve been making pens

So, I’ve been making pens for the last few months. Here are some examples. The first two are my first “commission”, in that my brother in law asked for some pens for a friend’s farewell gift.

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More wood turning

Just another batch of things I’ve worked on recently.

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A couple of days of turning

So… I finally got my chisels on Wednesday and so I’ve done a little turning at home in the last few days. There are two other items not shown here: a tool handle (cause its boring) and a bowl where I had depth fail and it came apart. Its also clear to me that dust extraction in the garage is a thing in my future, because a shop vac just doesn’t cut if for cleanup.

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Another bowl

Here’s a bowl I made last weekend. My sister hurt herself at her Roller Derby match, so she ended up with the bowl of condolences. At first I thought this wood was ash, but its acutally catalpa.

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Initial play with wood turning

I’ve been going to the ACT Woodcraft Guild for the last year or so learning to turn wood on a lathe. I’m by no means an expert, but here are some of my early efforts.

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