Learning through Experience

Learning through experience, both good and bad, is certainly the main way I’ve learned most of my woodturning. I was shown the very basics, bought a couple of books and a video. However, it was experience which moved me along and improved my work. Good experiences of achieving a goal, the lightbulb experience when something suddenly clicked into place but also the experience of getting things disastrously wrong.

Wood turning really is a case of hand/eye co-ordination. The shape of a bowl is made by free hand movements of the tool against the wood. (This is different from metal work on a lathe where the tool is set up and takes a pre-determined cut off the metal.) So the shape of the bowl is totally up to the turner. When I turn the inside of the bowl I usually match the shape to the outside, (not always, sometimes it can work well to have a totally different shape inside). The thickness of wood left can be checked by eye, fingers or by calipers. I hardly ever use calipers and with experience can judge pretty well how thick it is. I have also enjoyed turning bowls extremely thinly! I like thin china and glass so I was bound to try turning the wood thin. It also works very well for green wood as this allows the wood to move slightly as it dries. Leave it thick and there is more chance of the wood cracking.

Before I had enough experience to judge reasonably accurately disasters did happen! I have misjudged the angle and gone through the side wall. I have also misjudged how much wood is left at the base and gone through that. It is a lot more difficult to judge the base as this is where the work is being held on to the lathe so there is a limit to how well you can see or feel the thickness. One time I turned an extremely pretty bowl out of Yew and made a tiny hole in the base. Apart from that the bowl was beautiful and I was very reluctant to throw it on the fire. I had a few old coins and put a silver three-penny piece in the hole. The bowl was admired and bought. I was offered more old coins and so started a whole new string to my bow. See examples of my work.