Well, another Sunday at BWT and another great day! The members and visitors were entertained and educated once again, this time by well known turner Simon Hope.
Simon has demonstrated at the club before and everyone was pleased to see him come back and bring a new set of ideas, projects and of course tools to entertain us with. The day started with a minor technical hitch - the new cameras didn't work quite as planned but once that was corrected Simon was able to get on with the tasks at hand.
The demonstration started with a table lamp, this one was to include a leather covered inner section as part of the base, Simon also took the opportunity to show us all how to do long hole drilling with a gun drill. This is a drill bit with a hollow centre through which compressed air is pumped, the overall impact is to drill long holes which do not wander off centre and have a very clean internal finish.
Simon made two of the upright components of the lamp, this allowed him to demonstrate the use of the copy finger attachment, a useful way to make faithful copies of spindle projects for those of us who get involved in production turning. The copy attachment is made and sold by Paul Howard.
The second project of the day was a threaded box in the shape of an acorn, in this case made of two different timbers - the darker of the two being an entirely unpronounceable timber related to Blackwood and the lighter being Camphor Laurel. The smell from the Laurel made its way pretty much all round the room. The acorn box is now sitting on the shelf at home, thanks Simon!!
The threading on this box was done using the jig which is made and sold by Simon, a very solid and well engineered bit of kit.
Simon also demonstrated hand thread chasing by making a small box out of Yew, he gave out a lot of information and some very useful tips/pointers on hand chasing of threads.
The day was rounded off by turning a sphere from a piece of Jarrah burr, this was done using the sphere turning jig - again from Paul Howard.
Of course throughout the day members and visitors emptied out the contents of their piggy banks and a whole range of shiny new toys were purchased ... the number of people who went home with "raffle prizes" was probably fairly large......
All in all a great day.
