Beads of Courage Boxes

As a member of the American Association of Woodturners (AAW), I learned about the Beads of Courage program which was created to provide support to children with serious illness. Decorative beads are given to the children to symbolize each treatment they receive.   For many children with extended treatment programs their string of beads can become quite lengthy and they need some way to store them.  The American Association of Woodturners (AAW) has partnered with Beads of Courage to provide containers for the children's beads.  The typical container is a woodturned cylindrical vessel and lid. I decided for my first venture to do dovetailed boxes with turned lids. I made five of them incorporating the Beads of Courage logo bead into the lids and recently delivered four of them to the Minnesota chapter of AAW for distribution to the Minnesota children’s hospitals. Beads of Courage is a wonderful program based in Arizona but now serving children in 260 hospitals in six countries. For more information about Beads of Courage you can visit the website: www.beadsofcourage.org.

Ed Downey

Easter eggs

My wife regularly and beautifully changes our house decor by the season.  Some of my wood creations become part of that decor. Over the years I have experimented with various kinds of Easter eggs.  On the “woodturned vessels” page you can see some of the small maple eggs that I have turned and decorated with burned lines and various colors.  

I recently added a photo to the “holidays” page that shows some of my other egg creations. Two of them are purchased basswood eggs that I have chip carved, one colored and one not. Chip carving is the process of removing triangular “chips” of wood to create a repeating pattern and is used in various kinds of folk art.

 The largest creation is actually a hollowed candy dish with egg shaped openings to show the colors of the candies.  It looks like an egg sitting on a separate egg cup but it is actually one piece of black walnut.  The egg to the middle right is made of black date palm, a beautiful wood that gives nasty splinters if you don’t work with care.  The one to the right front is my newest creation, a walnut egg with a lighter wood band.  This was created by bandsawing the blank in half and gluing it back together with a thin strip of lighter wood between the halves. The red and multicolored eggs on the left are made from the same type of manufactured wood that I used for my recent Christmas ornaments.  The tiny egg in the front was made from a cutoff from a plastic pen blank. 

The egg cups are of various woods.  The back left cup with the chip carved egg is made from an ash tree from our yard.  The black one is ebony and the tiny one in front is tulipwood. The middle right one is dated 2004 but I’m not sure of the wood variety.  

Making eggs and egg cups is a great way to produce something pleasing from wood scraps and cutoffs. We’ll have to see what next year brings.

Ed Downey

Holiday Ornaments 2017

Several years back I made a number of snowmen out of scrap wood.  I turned them to shape on the lathe, used a woodburning pen to mark the facial features and the buttons and used twigs for the arms.  In some cases I made wooden hats out of contrasting woods but in most cases my wife made hats and scarves out of fabric.  Combining the hard wood with the softness of various types of cloth was often very striking. We gave the snowmen as gifts to family, friends and work colleagues. You can see some examples on the “holiday” page. 

This fall I was delighted to find a vendor who had snowman ornament kits with top hats in the choice of gold or chrome. I have six examples on the “holiday” page. For the snow ball material I simply used a poplar dowel purchased at the local lumber yard.  Poplar is not the best turning wood because its quite soft and doesn’t cut cleanly like a harder wood such as maple. But I wanted a light colored wood and it was convenient to have some of the turning done for me.  Similar to other ornament kits as well as pen kits, a hole is drilled all the way through the length of the wood blank and a brass tube is glued into the hole.  A metal rod called a mandrel is then put through the brass tube and supports the blank as it spins on the lathe.  After the wood was turned to shape and sanded, I burned the features, applied superhero stickers in some cases, finished the wood wIth CA glue, and pressed the hat and bottom buttons into the brass tube.  I enjoyed experimenting with snowball shapes and facial expressions, and since a number of these guys were going to end up in Arizona, I couldn’t help but make one as if he was out in the sun too long.  He actually turned out to be my favorite of the bunch.

The other new pieces on the “holiday” page were turned from manufactured wood with the  brand names of Spectraply and Dymalux.  Layers of birch veneer are dyed and bonded together and impregnated with resin.  The material is easy to work with and sands and polishes to a gloss without using wax or other finishing material. These products are used for gun stocks, knife handles, and pepper mills because of their stability and durability.  The 11 inch holiday tree and the 2 inch round ornaments have alternating birch layers in multiple colors. The 3 inch ornament with the polished aluminum bands is also made of layers of birch veneer but only dyed with one color.  

The aluminum bands on the red ornament were created by cutting grooves about a 1/16 inch deep and filling the grooves with a paste made of aluminum powder and CA glue.  Once the materiaI has hardened, sand and polish as usual.

Ed

Christmas Gifts 2017.

Before talking about the items I made this year as Christmas gifts for family and friends, I draw your attention to the natural-edged bowl on the “woodturned vessels” page. I made this bowl as a birthday gift for a dear family friend at the suggestion of my wife.  It is made from a chunk of black walnut from a tree I cut down in early 2000’s. Obviously it was quite dry so I didn’t have to worry about the wood cracking as I worked with it.  I did however have concerns about the bark breaking away as I turned the wood so I periodically soaked the edge of the bark with a thin version of cyanoacrylate adhesive (CA), best known as Krazy or Super glue. After completing the shape of the bowl, I also used the CA as the finishing material. CA is often used for finishing wooden objects that get a lot of handling such as pens, tool handles etc. CA is relatively easy to use as long as you have a means to vent the fumes and protect your skin and you don’t mind doing multiple coats with sanding in between. Overall I was very pleased with the outcome and the enjoyment it gave to our friend.

In the “everyday” page, there are two sets of salt and pepper mills that I made as Christmas gifts for my sons. The first is made of pau rosa, a deep red colored hardwood from Africa. The other is made of bocote, a hardwood with a green cast found in Mexico and Central/South America. I chose these two woods because they are less dense and thus easier to drill than some hardwoods.  The grinder mechanisms, made by a company called CrushGrind, use ceramic cutters to withstand the corrosive effect of salt. The coarseness adjustment is on the bottom of the mechanism eliminating the metal knob found on top of traditional pepper mills and allowing for endless design possibilities.     

Figuring how to best show off the beauty of the wood while creating a pleasing design is the fun part of wood turning.  But the process of constructing mills is fairly complicated.  The initial block of wood is approximately 3 x 3 x 12 inches.  After turning it to a cylinder shape, the top handle section or grinding knob is cut away from the body. A number of drilling steps take place with several drill bit sizes ranging from 1& 3/4 inches to 15/16 inches.  The bottom of the block is drilled to create the space for the grinding mechanism, and then, using a smaller bit, a hole is drilled all the way through the body creating a virtual tube of wood.  Mounting the mechanism in the bottom of the tube creates the storage space for the unmilled salt/pepper. Part of the grinder mechanism is hidden in the top knob and drilling is required to make space for this unit.  In a later step the top handle is shaped to fit into the top of the tube and to connect with the grinder mechanism.  

With the drilling steps completed, the wood is remounted on the lathe to create the final shapes of the mills. I wanted to do something different from the classic spindle design of traditional mills.  The pau rosa set uses similar design elements in both pieces but in a different sequence with the top knob in one being a basic ball and the other, a stepped cylinder. The bocote set uses the same design but the mills are distinguishable mills by having very different coloring and. grain patterns. The bocote set has pairs of black rings encircling the cylinder sections.  Those black rings, which are seen on several objects displayed on my website, are a popular way of dressing up turned wood items.  They are created by cutting a small groove in the spinning wood and then applying a wire to the groove and holding the wire tight against the wood until friction heats the wire to the point of burning the wood and leaving a blackened ring. The thickness of the ring is determined by the gauge of the wire.

The wood blanks used for these mills were purchased from an online vendor and arrived with a thick coating of wax to prevent them from drying too fast. High moisture content is always a concern and wood has to dry slowly to avoid cracking or checking.  As I worked on the mills, I would continuously put the partially completed parts in sealed plastic bags to control moisture loss.  I wasn’t too worried about the mill bodies because drilling out the centers removes a lot of moisture but the top knob section is another story. I did end up with some minor checking (small cracks) on the upper surfaces.

Ed

Outdoor Table

In this first post I will share a bit about my recent effort to build an outdoor table from Ipe. This table replaces a red cedar table that succumbed to wood rot after sitting in the elements for 25 years.  As you can see from the photo on the furniture page, some of my deck boards have had to be replaced also. While another cedar table would have easily outlived me, I decided to do something of heirloom quality and distinctive. After some research I chose a wood called Ipe which grows in South and Central America and is regularly used for boat decking because of its resistance to weather conditions. 

I did a rough estimate of the amount of board feet I would need and ordered 2 twenty board foot bundles from Woodworkers Source. When buying wood in bundles you get a better price by taking random sizes selected by the vendor.  I developed my final design based on the actual sizes of the boards I received.  Most of the boards in the shipment were six foot long and 7.5 to 8 inches wide.  One was almost 11 inches wide and that board became the center piece for the table top with two narrower boards on either side. Some of the boards had slight cupping so I decided that, rather than ripping them (cutting them lengthwise) and regluing to flatten the boards, I would do a slight bevel on the top edges of the boards creating a v-groove at the joint line that would hide any slight mismatch between the boards.  To add some interest to the center board I created arcs away from the center hole using a Dremel rotary tool mounted in a Veritas Plunge Base. Ipe is a very dense, hard, and heavy wood unlike any I had ever used before.  Ipe cuts beautifully with carbide saw blades but flattening a surface with a plane is another story. My power plane couldn’t handle it. When gluing the boards for the legs I tried to be as precise as possible so I only needed a sander to smooth things out.  I used my Festool Domino machine with Sipo Dominos to join the legs to the aprons and to edge glue the top. Dominos are chunks of wood inserted into slots in adjoining pieces of wood to strengthen the glue joint. The Dominos used in this table are made of Sipo which is a rot resistant wood in the mahogany family from Africa.

Ipe is a beautiful dark brown color which untreated and exposed to weather will turn gray with time.  I am hoping to delay the weathering by using Penofin 550 Marine oil as the finish. The resulting table is so heavy that it took five people to move it from my garage to the rear deck of our house.  I am very pleased with the table and will be interested in seeing how it holds up to the elements.

Ed