Serving Southeastern West Virginia

West Virginia Woodturners Association

The West Virginia Woodturners Association provides woodturners in southeastern West Virginia and western Virginia with an opportunity to meet other turners, enhance their skills, and share their skills and interests in woodturning. Send an email to info@wvwoodturners.com to request additional information about the club and its activities. Several members sell their turnings on the Appalachian Woodturners Guild website.

Next Meeting - May 24

The May meeting will begin at 9:30 AM at Gerald Chandler's shop in Crawley. Techniques for turning plates and platters will be demonstrated and Club members will be challenged to turn one or several. Plates and platters should be ready for display at the meeting on July 26.

April Meeting Highlights

Sixteen members and one guest attended the meeting on April 26 at Gerald's shop. In addition to the door prize and raffle drawings, several members brought their recent turnings for Show and Tell. Jerald Carter demonstrated how to turn a bowl from a single plank or board and Jim Myers showed an aternate way to turn the tapered rings using the Ringmaster tool.

Larry Weese from the Mountaineer Woodturners club in Ripley was our guest and he showed a recent pierced bowl that he had turned and two shallow bowls that were decorated with pyrography designs. He starts the decoration process by making the design on a PC, printing it on paper, and gluing the pattern to the bowl using contact cement. He used a Dremel tool for piercing the pattern in two steps. The first removed most of the waste wood but leaves a rough, burned edge. A very light second cut was made to smooth the edge and remove burn marks. For the pyrography decoration, he first burned the outline of the design using a straight tip. He removed the remaining paper pattern and glue with turpentine and filled in the design using a rounded tip. We look forward to having Larry demonstrate his techniques at a future meeting. Check out Larry's website weesewoodgems.com to see more of his very creative turnings.

7" Pierced Maple bowl

Decorated Cherry Bowl

Decorated Walnut Bowl

Auction Treasures!

Auxiliary Table

Ready for Turning

Heading Home

Jerald Carter: Turning a Bowl From A Plank

Jerald Carer demonstrated how to turn a bowl from a single board or plank. This is a very efficient way to use valuable wood because there is very little wood removed during the turning process. However, the profile of the bowl must be a straight line at the parting angle of the rings although a more complex profile is possible if several boards are used to cut rungs at different angles. For a simple bowl with sides at a 45 degree angle, the ring spacing must be exactly equal to the thickness of the board and the parting tool is held at a 45 degree angle to the face of the board. When laying out the rings. the smallest ring must be large enough to provide a stable base for the finished bowl and to allow safe mounting to the chuck or faceplate when the bowl is turned. Jerald prefers to use the 1/16" Ashby Iles parting tool supplied by Craft Supplies for separating the rings.

Jerald Carter

Ashby Iles Parting Tool

Layout for 45 Degree Rings

Jerald attaches the blank to an MDF faceplate using double faced tape from Amazon. He uses a template to align the parting tool at 45 degrees when he starts cutting a ring but continues freehand once the cut is 1/4" deep. The parting tool tends to bind in the cut, especially when cutting the smaller rings, because there is no clearance in the kerf - the kerf is circular but the tool is straight. After all the rings have been cut through, the individual rings are pried off the faceplate and surfaced with a drum sander. The rings are glued together and the bowl is ready for final shaping. Since the ring width is the same as the thickness, almost no wood ahs to be removed when the bowl is turned.

Separating a Ring

Rings Ready for Assembly

Assembled Bowl Blank

Ringmaster

Cutting a Ring

Jim Meyer demonstrated an alternate way to cut rings using the Ringmaster bowl system. Although the system is moderately expensive, it makes it very easy to cut rings at the exact angle needed for the design being used. To make a bowl or vase with complex profile, rings need to be cut at different angles. The book "Wooden Bowls" by Carol Rothman ISBN 978-1-56523-433-8 publised iin 2009 by Fox Chapel Publishing includes very useful tables showing the angles needed to produce different profiles. Another book by the same author describes how to make elaborate boxes using a similar technique. The book is "Wooden Boxes", ISBN 978-1-56523-541-0.

Lathes and Lasagna

Lathes and Lasagna sessions are held on the first and third Tuesday evenings of the month at Bill Sproul's shop in Lewisburg. Turning is from 4 pm until whenever with dinner and a surprise dessert about 7 p.m. In addition to turning, one person also serves as "Chef of the Day" and prepares dinner and dessert for the group. In order for the Chef of the Day to prepare sufficient dinner for everyone, participants must RSVP to Bill no later than the Monday evening before the session.

General Club Information

For further information about Lathes and Lasagna or any other WVWA activity, call Bill at (304) 645-5332.

Supporting Companies

We would like to thank these companies for the support they have provided to the Club during the past year. Check out their websites when you are ready to purchase products that they stock.

Craft Supplies USA is a one-stop shopping site for everything a wood turner might need or want - lathes, tools, accessories, project supplies, materials, and more.

Woodcraft offers a 10% discount at the Roanoke store to WVWA members when they show a current membership card.

by WVWA, a chapter of the American Association of Woodturners