Turning Workshop Schedule and Registration 2012

Turning Workshop Registration form- Please return soon with your deposit to reserve a place.

Name______________________________ Phone # Work_________ Home____________ Cell______________

Address_____________________________________________ City__________________ State_____ Zip____

Email address________________________________

2 day Workshops/3 turners  $295   Mark weekends you prefer with a 1, 2, 3 with your first preference as #1.  As of Jan 14, these are the spaces still left available.

_Full_January 20-21    _1 space_February 10-11   _Full_ Feb 24-25    _Full_ March 9-10     _Full_March 30-31 (Bay Window Quilt Schoolhouse Day)    _1-space_April 27-28    _Full_May 18-19

Other dates may be added and these may be changed.  The above workshops require a deposit of $125 refundable up to 30 days before .  Balance of $170 payable at 2-day workshop.  Balance of $270 payable at 5-day workshop.

1 Day Workshops/ 4 turners $95 

_3 spaces_ Adult+Child Turning Day 9-3 on March 3  (4 pairs of child and adult)

_2 spaces_Multiple Bowl Coring on March 16 and _2 spaces__Hollowing and Threading on March 17, both from 8:30 AM-5:30 PM

Cost for 1 day workshops is $95: deposit of $50, $45 balance at workshop  These workshops all include lunch and/or treats.

Questions can be sent to philholtan@msn.com.   Housing and other information on my web site at philholtan.net

After I hear from you, I will contact you soon to confirm dates. Questions?  Call Phil at 218-346-3860

Mail deposit and registration to: Phil Holtan 43497 County Highway 53 Perham, MN 56573

Knowing our Raw Material: Wood

I like very much the quote by Sam Maloof, one of the master woodworkers of our age:

“The reverence the object maker has for the materials, for the shape, and for the miracle of his skill transcend to God, the Master Craftsman, the Creator of all things, who uses us, our hands, as His tools to make these beautiful objects.”

 We have a unique material for our craft as hand-turners — we use wood (yes, there are some metal-spinners, and turners of alabaster, bone, ivory and other materials out there). And we use it not as a commodity, but as the very heart of our craft. We need to love it, know its strengths and weaknesses and how to use them, where to find it, and how to anticipate and make best use of the unique beauty of each piece.

 I will show you several qualities of wood that you may find helpful, and describe how we need to treat it to make best use of it.

 Spindle turners are most often content with kiln-dried, store-bought lumber, though most often in plank form. Some swear by air-dried as less “brittle.” But bowl turners tend to like the raw wood, green or semi-green, and often have to find it themselves.

 Straight wood- sound structure, interesting grain, natural edge can make more interesting in a bowl, bark held on (winter cut). Quarter-sawn or flat-sawn figure? Shape is more important than ever when the grain is not spectacular.

 Color-There are lots of beautiful colors in wood; think of walnut and ash, purple heart, padauk, zebrawood. Color is usually based on extractives in the wood. Remember, all colors fade.

• Tropical woods are most vivid and they tend to have toxic extractives in the wood that give protection against “bugs.” Color tends to fade with exposure to ultraviolet light. Try ArmorAll for slower fading. Contrast of wood is the very heart of segmented “polychromatic” bowls.
• Contrast of heartwood and sapwood works great with a natural edge bowl, as in black ash, walnut, and Russian olive. The contrast between heartwood and sapwood in a green log disappears within about a year of cutting as the extractives migrate into the sapwood and make the whole log the same color.
• Match the figure to the object- too large a grain figure on a small object is not attractive.

 Crotch wood- The feather figure is thin and surrounds the pith in the plane of the Y. It is most useful if you do a natural-edge bowl and put the feather figure on the bottom of the bowl.

 Curly grain, also called fiddleback, tiger, or rippled. Curly grain is the result of stress and you will need to plan for the warp factor. You can often identify it even before y ou cut down the tree.  It is Visible as a horizontal (at right angles to the bark ridges) rippled effect in the outside bark of the tree.

Birdpeck is most often a result of a yellow bellied sapsucker. Single or multiple years of attack. It’s probably most evident in maple. I have also found sugar tap stains in the same tree.

“Spalted” is the old Anglo-Saxon word for “spoiled.” Bacterial and fungal organisms invade the wood, break down the wood fibers and also add color and figure to the wood. The colors are distinctive- crimson for box elder, lavender and shades of brown in elm, yellow and black zone lines on birch etc. A wood technologist recently told me that the dark zone lines are battle lines, where the living wood marshals its defenses of antibodies and other disease fighters to combat the encroaching infections. Salted wood is fussy to work with and walls of the bowl need to be left thicker for strength. Sanding is essential for a good finish. Stock up on Superglue and oil.

Wormy wood is experienced another of nature’s composting processes. Can be very interesting. Most people don’t like holes in the bottom of a bowl, but are OK with holes high on the sides.

Burl wood comes in two varieties, onion or eyed.

     Onion or layered burl is often the result of injury that the tree tries to heal over. This is often very curly figured grain but not nearly so prized as an eyed burl. I have a picture of an oak burl I recently brought home and here is a piece of that burl, sliced into slabs for stool tops and other projects.

     Eyed burl is actually a tumor. These are buds that can never follow through to become branches. The effect is like bird’s eye figure on steroids- larger, more dense, and colorful. The wood itself is also more dense (boxelder turns like its cousin, sugar maple) and has no grain direction, so they tend to turn beautifully, even in usually punky woods. Caused by virus, injury or heredity? Very rare, but most common in box elder and black ash.

 How to best use burl wood? Take advantage of the conical orientation of the eyes. If the burl is shallow, place the figure where it will show most. Perhaps a hollow vessel for a shallow burl.

 Drying wood without cracking

• The best way to keep a bowl from cracking is to turn it thin as appropriate for its final use, and uniform. Thickness in the bottom is most likely to cause a bowl to crack.
• Wood takes about a year per inch to air dry. Carefully treat the vulnerable end grain.
• You almost always need to avoid the pith, the center of the tree, because it is juvenile wood and very unstable and prone to cracking. The outside of tree shrinks more than the center. If you break that rule, then turn the bowl thin so the pith can “dimple out” when it shrinks.
• My ideal is that they would dry for a month or two outdoors so they lose most of their moisture but are still at little risk of cracking. (free moisture gone, bound moisture still in wood) In the winter, you need to dry them inside but be very careful because with the low humidity there is great risk of end grain cracking.
• I like to harvest wood in the longest pieces that I can carry since the inside pieces of a longer log have virtually no risk of cracking, at least for a year. Store out of rain and direct sun.
• Plan for the shrinking (5-10 percent). If you need a truly round object, like a box and cover, you need to turn it thick enough to still get a circle out of the dried oval, wax to prevent cracking, especially the end grain. Then remount on the lathe and finish off the bottom. You can keep track of the weight to track the drying or use a moisture meter.
• You can try the microwave to speed this up but there is a lot of stress in a thicker blank and your chances of cracking the wood go up fast. If you microwave, do it in short bursts with careful monitoring of how hot it gets.
• The fruitwoods are beautiful to cut but crack much more easily than the nut woods, so be careful with them.
• Some woods have a bad reputation for being “brittle” and for splitting, especially the family of mulberry, black and honey locust and Osage orange. Pecan too.

 People enjoy the flashier woods, like burls and box elder. However, remember that the shape of the bowl, and that means mostly the curve, is what counts in the long haul.

A Bowl for Garrison Keillor

Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion” radio program gets its name in part from the Prairie Home Cemetery in Moorhead, MN, across the street fromConcordia College.  In the fall of 1992 the cemetery board removed a number of diseased elm trees and mature box elders from the cemetery and I harvested several of the prime logs for a special collection of wooden bowls. 

 One reason I enjoyed it was because my wife Merrie Sue’s great grandparents, the Kolbergs, were buried in the cemetery.  It’s a great old-fashioned cemetery, and Merrie Sue often did writing exercises in the cemetery in which students imagined from the old headstones something of the life of those who were buried there.

 In March of 1993, I was commissioned by Minnesota Public Radio to make one of those bowls for Garrison himself to be presented at the close of a live broadcast of the Prairie Home Companion. 

 I had turned his bowl from the part of the tree I knew would be the most colorful and highly figured, the crotch or “Y” of the tree.

• I knew enough not to tell him it was from the crotch of the tree, though it was. 
• I knew enough not to tell him it was spalted, that is, rotten, though it was.
• But I did tell him the bowl from an elm that died from Dutch Elm Disease. 

 I should have guessed what a comedian might do. He immediately put it on his head and said, “Just what I always wanted, a diseased bowl.” 

 A few weeks later, he sent me a letter, basically to apologize for what he had said and to explain how uncomfortable he was in receiving awards.  Then he closed the letter as follows:

 “The roots of the elm reached down into the earth, gathered nutrition from our ancestors, transferred their earthly remains into wood, and now, the tree itself having fallen victim to disease, this bowl is left to tell the story, and to gather good things and hold them in a graceful way, as a symbol of those who kept the faith. 

 Please be assured that I will keep this bowl prominently in view and in my mind, will keep only what is most important in it, and will think of the cemetery and you whenever I look in it to find treasures.

With many thanks, Garrison Keillor”

Be a Burl-Hunter

One of my greatest joys is “bagging the big burl.” It has the joy of the hunt to it, because the really good burls are quite rare, and you need to have permission to harvest the tree when you do find it, which is unusual. I have a number of ways to find burls. Sometimes loggers will sell them to me directly. Sometimes I get calls from people or talk to them at shows and they have burls for me.  The more people know you and of your interest in turning burls, the more they will let you know what burls they may have.

And it isn’t easy to know what they have.  Often I have to sort through their information to find exactly what they have.  It sometimes helps to tell them that the kind of burl I am looking for, an “eyed” burl, always has a dome-like, circular shape.  Even if it is built up of multiple smaller domes, you can generally see that underlying pattern.  The other kind of burl, and “onion” or layered burl, is often the result of an injury.  For example, sugar maples often get a frost split when the sap rises up into the tree too early in the spring and a sharp overnight freeze will crack that trunk from top to bottom.  That crack will develop a “barky” growth that will cover the crack, but it has little solid wood in it and won’t amount to good turning blanks.

Sometimes I still won’t know if a burl is an eyed or layered burl until I cut it open.  This huge oak burl had good color and figure, but it wasn’t an eyed burl and therefore I didn’t use the burl for bowls but used it instead for stool tops and other lower grade projects.

This burl, posed with the forklift, is unusual for its quality, yielding dozens of fine bowls and also that it came from the Wisconsin Dells, while most of mine are from short miles around my shop.

This is the right way to cut a burl, with generous length of log on either side of the burl.

When I find the burl, I usually have a big cutting job ahead. This very fine eyed burl, which is boxelder, is very close to the ground and I carefully brushed away the dirt from the lower edge in order to cut as low as possible without dulling my chain too badly.

This is a very good boxelder burl with lots of crimson spalting, strong eyes, and a good shape for coring out multiple bowls from one blank.

This was a very fine grained and beautifully spalted boxelder.

I cut it into smaller pieces in order to haul it home and because I need manageable chunks for my lathes too. But I try for the largest quality pieces I can. When I cut them, I look for “fault lines” in the bark that indicate that there is a crack or a bark inclusion between two burls that have grown together. That is an obvious place to cut. I often use cardboard circles of various sizes to lay out the best way to cut up the burl.

What a rush!

 

It's good to have some help when you're hauling the burls home.

Bowls for Creative Rosemalers

I received a call a couple of years ago from Vesterheim, the Norwegian American Cultural Museum in Decorah, IA, who also run the Folk Art School there. http://vesterheim.org They specialize in Scandinavian folk arts and teach people to carve, make knives, weave and all the other unique folk arts. They teach a lot of rosemaling too, the Norwegian “rose painting.” They called me because Turid Fatland was coming from Norway to teach a new style of rosemaling. In her painting she does not try to recreate forms and painting styles of long ago, but she paints on unusual and distressed bowls, often with natural bark edges, in a free style way. They needed over 100 bowls for the painting classes and wondered if I could turn them. I had plenty of lead time and was fascinated by the idea so I said yes and began to prepare. I emailed Turid Faland in Norway and visited her web site http://turidrosemaling.com/ to get a better idea of the style she wanted.

 

She wanted basswood, which I do not use often. It is soft and difficult to cut cleanly, especially green. I determined that I would need to to “twice-turn” these bowls, which means to first turn them green and then, when they are dry, turn them again. This way they are really round and have a more consistent finish. But even to turn these green is difficult. My friend Dick Enstad gave me the clue. “Turn the wood frozen,” he said. That gave it enough stiffness and body to cut more cleanly.  It also meant that I could store them outside frozen, turn them quickly and then dry them very quickly in the shop so that there was  little chance for “spalting,” fungal growth that would discolor the bowls.

 

So I did. It was some of the most enjoyable turning I have ever done. I used my largest bowl gouge, a ¾ inch Ellsworth grind gouge, with the corners ground back 1 ¼”. In this soft wood I found I could cut over 1” thick with each pass and I could rough them out quickly. Sometimes the woodshaving that came off the tool was 50 feet long before it broke off. I’ve done two batches of these bowls, both over 100 bowls, and the picture shows the result of one of the roughing out weekends, 50 bowls or more with a mountain of ships. In my new shop I overwhelmed the ventilation with all the wet chips and had moisture everywhere. I learned that you need to get the wet chips out of your shop ASAP. 

Dozens of basswood bowls to be rosemaled

I coated the end grain with paste wax or end grain sealer right after they were turned and then I waited a month or two until the blanks had reached equilibrium with the air. Then I returned them on my lathe, usually with a padded disc on a faceplate to center and support the out-of round bowl until I could turn the outside and then onto the chuck for the inside. On the table below you see a batch of the almost finished bowls. I used a vacuum chuck to hold the bowl finished off the base and then I spray them all with flat lacquer, several coats with sanding between each coat. Then they are ready for the rosemalers.

This is an example of a bowl by Ken Magnuson, perhaps Turid’s most prolific student in America. He does extraordinary work and I am very proud to see what these rosemaling painters can do with my bowl blanks.

 

Turning Pens with Kids

First the kids lean about safety, watch Phil use the different tools to make a pen, and then they are ready to turn a pen themselves.

He prepares to use color pens to decorate his pen

These kids were really small, but they still did very well.

Big Lathe Story

In about 2003, I answered an ad from Ron Kyllo that he had tools for sale. After speaking to his wife Dorrie, I visited their home along the Red River south ofFargo.

It was a tragic story. Ron was a patternmaker in Fargo for many years, but a few years before had been paralyzed by a mysterious illness and now had to be on a respirator 24 hours a day. His wife Dorrie gives him awesome care.

Ron and Dorrie had some amazing tools for sale from his patternmaking business. I bought a couple of band saws, including the 20” Delta I still use. I also was intrigued by the huge Oliver patternmaking lathe that he had in his garage. He told me it weighed 3500 pounds and that he had used it to turn many patterns, including the patterns for generations of Steiger tractors. A pattern is a wooden form that a patternmaker turns to very careful specifications that is then used to give shape to a sand core and into which cast iron or steel is poured to make cast metal parts.

Ron said the lathe had originally been in a marine shipyard in Florida but had been shipped to Fargo Foundry years before and used for many years. It had a three phase motor with 4 speeds, but Ron had jury-rigged a way to turn larger patterns on the outboard end and he didn’t know for sure that it even still worked.

I decided that I didn’t have room for it so I didn’t proceed with it at that time.

But in 2006, when I decided to take a pastoral call in Perham, MN, and during the time when I had moved out of my Fargo shop and was waiting to build a new shop in Perham, I took a look at that lathe once again and bought it for $750.

My son Mark and I used a shop crane to life the disassembled pieces into my tandem trailer and haul them to the metalworking shop of Jerry Swedberg in rural Rollag. Jerry is an excellent and experienced machinist and was willing to make a riser block to raise up the headstock and tailstocks of the lathe from 16” to 32”.

We had a few other challenges too.  We didn’t know if the lathe would run.  It hadn’t run for at least 15 years and the shaft was very, very stiff, though it did move.  I had a plan.  Even if the motor didn’t work, I would remove the motor, put a pulley on the outboard end and run it from another motor that I hung on the back of the lathe.  I had another Oliver lathe in which I had used the same system.  But I didn’t want to do that.  So I got some good advice, took off some guards and tried to dig out as much old grease as I could from the bearing.  Then I squirted in new grease and turned the shaft as I put in the new grease.  It became a bit more free.

I found more information about this lathe on the internet.  It’s an Oliver 25 Pattern Maker’s motor head lathe, built int he 1950′s.  I spent a lot of time looking at the electrical diagrams and at the lathe.  I saw that there had been some serious shorts in the electrical switches and that some of the circuit board material was burned and no longer supported the contacts.  I also found that the machine was wired incorrectly, for two-phase rather than three phase power.  So, I used some old outlet box material to rebuild the circuit board and reconnected the contacts for three phase power.

Then I ordered a 5 HP Variable frequency drive to convert from single phase to three phase power and give me variable speed.  I had retrofitted several lathes in my shop already so I knew how to do this.  Then, as a precaution, when I felt I was ready to plug in the lathe and try it, I called on Larry Lange, a friend from my church who had been a maintenance troubleshooter for the machines at Barrel of Fun in Perham for many years.  He brought a friend even more experienced than he and they looked and asked questions about the hook ups and they were encouraging.  And finally, we plugged it in, and nothing happened.  Nothing.  I jiggled the switches around, still nothing.  Then I tried changing the speed control on the lathe to the lowest speed, 600 rpm and the shaft gave a little twitch.  I used my hand to give the faceplace a little boost and it started to gain a little speed.  It seems the shaft was still very gummed up with old grease, but we kept putting in more and scraping out the old grease that pushed out.  The lathe started running faster and smoother and we cheered.  We were in business.

So far we were still in my garage because the shop wasn’t ready.  In preparation for placing the lathe in my shop, we poured an extra thick concrete pad under the lathe to handle the extra weight and vibration.  We also hung a steel I-beam from the ceiling on which we placed two thousand-pound chain hoists so we can move the heavy tailstock or lift large turning blanks into position. 

Even before we moved the lathe into position in the new shop, while the lathe was still in my garage, I turned the large columns for the shop. 

Here we are moving the lathe to its place in my new workshop.  This is my daughter who was an Army captain at the time, with her Italian paratrooper boyfriend.  They rose to the occasion of the moving like a military operation.  We were grateful that Dave Gausman lent me his moving equipment, a pair of heavy duty castors with hydraulic jacks that lifted the lathe right off the ground and made it quite easy to move.

Tom Lex, who poured concrete for my shop, suggested that I pour a double-thick pad for this lathe, so the floor was all ready for it when we moved the 4000 pound monster to its place.

I had also hung an I-beam over the lathe with two rolling dollies on it with 1000 pound chain lifts.  I carefully hung it from the trusses so that the weight is evenly distributed between many different trusees.

The beam and hoises allows me to lift my tail stock, because with its riser block, it weighs more than 100 pounds by itself.  I am also prepared to lift heavy turning blocks into place, though I haven’t had to use it so far.  In the last picture, of the lathe moved into its final position, you can see the I beam and twin chain hoists.