Category: Show-and-Tell

Acer negundo is a variety of maple, commonly known as box elder or ash-leaf maple. Being a thirsty tree, it is often found in creek bottoms. It’s most noted feature of interest to woodturners is the red stain found in what is often referred to as ‘flame box elder.’ Research has found that the red… Continue reading Flame box elder

A neighbor gave me a massive oak burl, far bigger than anything I’ve ever worked with. So this is a learning experience for me. I started by cutting the burl protrusion off horizontally, about half of the height of this piece. I then cut that in two, slicing it down the middle on the longer… Continue reading Big oak burl: what to do?

Pete Kaup brought a bunch of “butternut” to our February meeting, and it was wood from the butternut tree, not the same-named butternut squash, toffee or Massachusetts ski resort. The butternut tree is also commonly called ‘white walnut,’ and it is a close relative of the black walnut. Both are mildly toxic to other plants,… Continue reading “Butternut”: is it a tree, a squash, a toffee or a ski resort?

robertmarshall949brasstownwoodturners.org

This was the outline used by Robert Marshall, in presentation on this topic, Uses of Epoxy in Woodturning, on January 6, 2024. I plan to update this post with contributions from Jeff Bagley, who co-presented on this topic at that meeting. robertmarshall949brasstownwoodturners.org

That’s a mouthful, for sure. It identifies a 3-D geometric shape, formed of 12 pentagonal pyramids, each made up of 5 identical triangles. Thus, it has 60 (12 * 5) identical pieces. In this case, we’re talking about an assembly of sixty 3/4″ plywood pieces, whose dimensions and angles permit them to fit together to… Continue reading Pentakis Dodecahedron

The spalted wood I like to turn for its colorful grain often comes with a down side: soft, punky wood which shows a lot of ‘tear-out’ on end-grain cutting. Because the wood is soft, the cutting tool doesn’t get the benefit of having hard wood ahead of the wood being cut, so the fibers tend… Continue reading Treating punky wood to get a clean final cut

This project was inspired by one of Philip Moulthrop’s hollow-forms, which I saw in an exhibition at the Atlanta Botanical Gardens. The project begins with a simple hollow-form which will serve as the base for the mosaic work. This base can be any wood at all; it will be almost entirely carved away in the… Continue reading Mosaic hollow-form

This project combines three uses of epoxy: (1) epoxy stabilization of spalted/rotten wood; (2) molded casting of epoxy and wood, and (3) epoxy finish coating. The wood pieces were mainly from corners cut off of half-round log blanks. Being on the outside of the logs, they were more severely spalted than the rest of the… Continue reading Mosaic dish: stabilized, mold-cast, turned and epoxy finished