Drying Rack

If you finish small pieces (such as lathe turnings), you almost certainly use something like this.

I got sick of the bottoms of my bowls sticking to the heads of the nails, some nails falling out when I take the bowls off, the bowls being unstable because the tops of the nails are at differing heights, etc, so I decided to make myself a good drying rack.  I did some thinking and came up with a design I thought would work well.  Here's what I came up with.

I started with a piece of scrap 3/4" wood and ran it through the jointer until the face was flat.  I then repeated for the other side.  I don't own a surfacer and in this application, it really doesn't matter if the top and bottom are parallel or not; the only purpose for the wood is to hold the nails upright.  I squared up both sides on the table saw, then returned to the jointer to make each smooth.  Trimmed the splits and paint off the ends and it was ready for the next stage.  While I was sizing the board, I also trimmed a scrap piece of paneling to the same exact size.  I ran it through the jointer taking off only 1/128" on each pass, just to flatten the top  (It had staple holes and divots in it; it needed to be flat.)  The underside was fine as-is.

I didn't want to have the heads of the nails sticking up, as that would simply lead to the projects sticking to the nails again - one of the things that was pissing me off at the originals.  I measured and drew 4 lines 3/4" apart lengthwise down the board and using a scrap piece of wood with two holes drilled 3/4" apart, used it to space the rest of the holes out.  (I used a smaller nail to line up one hole with the one drilled, then simply rotated the piece until the line appeared centered in the second hole and drilled it using the scrap as a locating jig.)

Grabbing the jar of nails, I quickly realized two very important things.  First, we had more than one brand nail in the jar of nails labeled 2.5" because some were over twice the diameter of others.  Second, nails really aren't what anybody can call a precision item - nails that were supposedly ALL 2.5" long varied by as much as 1/8" - certainly enough to make a bowl unbalanced and unstable.  Hmm - time to do some thinking...

Solution - use the sanding disk on my belt sander and a miter gauge with a stop block.  That will allow me to grind the nails to all the same length!  I set it up and ground every one of the 60 nails to the same length.  However, I foresaw a new problem.  Some of the nails were so long that they were flat on the ends, meaning the bottoms of the bowls would again stick to the end of the nails.  Not a big deal - I set the miter gauge to about 53 degrees and reset the stop block.  (I picked 53 degrees because I wanted as much of an angle as possible, but any farther and I wouldn't be able to hold the nails very well.)  So, I re-ground every one of the 60 nails again, this time rolling them to make a nice cone on the tips.

OK, at this point, the project has already taken about 2 hours longer than I anticipated, most of it spent hunched over the sander, and my back was killing me.  Almost done though...

Each nail was hammered in flush with the bottom of the board.  However, there was a problem - the tips of the nails were of different heights!  How in the...  Couldn't figure out how that was possible until I discovered two things.  First, the stop block had worn about a 32nd.  Second, the disk on my belt sander is anything but true - varies by almost 3/8" from one side of the wheel to the other!  WTF - I guess this is why I've never used the disk part of the sander!

I actually ground a few extra nails and there were only a few that were really, really bad, so I tapped these out and replaced them with different ones.  The tips are in different planes by small amounts, but nothing that should affect functionality.

For the finishing touch, I lined up the paneling with the bottom of the board and drilled 6 pilot holes, being careful to avoid the nail heads.  Then I counter-sunk the paneling and drove in 6 flat headed wood screws so the heads are just below the surface.  I originally used short drywall screws, but the 3/4" screws I have are fine threaded and they didn't hold in the soft pine board, so I replaced them easy enough.  Coarser threaded screw worked perfectly.

The reasoning for the paneling is two-fold.  First, the heads of the nails won't scratch anything I put it on like they would have I not had anything.  Second, the nails are not able to 'pop', or move out at all.  I have yet to use it, but feel that it will be much better than my previous blocks.

WoodCraft Cole Jaws

This is one in a series of posts about some of my past projects.

Those who have the wood river chuck and buy the cole jaws for it will probably be very interested in this one.


The standoffs that come with the cole jaws are more like hard plastic than they are rubber. If you don't tighten the chuck enough, the bowl will spin easily and the black plastic they used for the nubs creates a nice black streak around the outer rim of the bowl. By the time you tighten the chuck enough for it to hold the bowl, you'll create a divot where each pin is around the edge of your bowl. IMO, they dropped the ball on this part; I have no idea what they were thinking, but highly doubt that whoever designed them knows anything about turning.

The solution is to buy a Nova cole jaw kit, priced at $11, along with your cole jaws. (I got my cole jaws for christmas and went back to woodcraft with a crushed edge bowl; after kicking ideas around, the guy sold me the nova kit at a discount in the hope it'd work. They were very helpful and had some good ideas.) On the way home, stop at the hardware store and get 8 lock washers of the size that the brass screws will just barely not fit through. (Sorry - didn't note the size and it's not on the receipt; they were a nickel each at ACE.) Take all of it home and using a pair of channel-lock pliers to hold the washer and a screwdriver inserted through it, twist the lock washer so it's basically flat. Put one on each brass screw and thread it into the grey rubber nubs, then put these on your cole jaws. You'll now be able to tighten your jaws around the edge of your bowl quite well and not damage your piece.



Explanation: The rubber nubs in the Nova kit are MUCH softer than the hard black plastic nubs that come with the wood river cole jaws and so can be tightened without damaging your work. The nubs that come with the wood river cole jaws have the black plastic molded right over the screws, so you have to use the nova screws. The only problem with this is that they're slightly long for the wood river jaws - if you put them in your cole jaws, the chuck will work very stiffly, if at all. This is because the back end of the screw is pressed against the face of the chuck behind the jaws and scratching the hell out of it. To get around this, you need some sort of washer, but regular washers don't have a chance of fitting down inside the gray nubs. I could use a regular washer between the nub and the face of the cole jaw, but then the edge of my bowls could slip underneath and be off-center, plus I'd have to keep track of the washers when changing the position of the nubs. By getting the small lock washers and deforming them to be flat, you open them up just enough for the screw to fit through and the OD is still just barely small enough to fit in the recesses in top of the grey nubs. This effectively makes the screws tighten the nubs against the face of the jaws and not protrude through the back into the chuck face. Additionally, the screws fit tight enough in the grey nubs that I needed to use a screwdriver to get them in; the grey nub, screw, and lock washer are effectively a single piece so I don't have to worry about them coming apart when moving the nubs to turn the bottom of different sized bowls.

Maple Bowl - Early 2011

This is another in a series of posts regarding past projects.  This was done in early 2011.

Here's another leftover piece of wood that I didn't quite know what I was going to do with. The maple was a very odd shape, being 12" wide and only 4" long with a 3/8" 'shelf' on the flat end where the guys cutting the tree down joined two cuts from opposite sides of the branch and they didn't meet up perfectly. Plus, it was severely split, with the cracks extending nearly all the way through in a couple places. I didn't have to cut it up much though, so it's what I used. (Yes, I am in the market for a bandsaw with decent resaw capacity. I freakin hate sawing by hand!!!) After turning it to basic shape, I used a tube of cyanoacrylate to fill up the cracks before clamping it together. I was actually watching the cracks get bigger when getting the glue/clamps ready; at the rate the cracks were expanding, I don't think it would have lasted another 10-15 minutes before splitting into two separate pieces. I then put it back on the lathe and finished turning it. It's still in one piece, so I must have done something right. Don't know how well it shows up in the pictures, but I put a rounded hollow undercut on the bottom before a pedestal-type foot. You can't really see the foot when it's sitting there, so it appears to be floating a quarter inch above whatever it's sitting on - a cool effect that I believe I'm going to try to replicate again in the future.

Spalted Birch Bowl err, Saucer - Early 2011

This is another of the posts chronicling some of my prior projects.  This was done in early 2011.

A friend of mine who works at another one of our stores gave me a piece of a big birch log end. The office lady who ferried it between stores looked like I'd just grown an eyeball on a stalk out of my forehead when I got so excited over there being mold growing on the ends. Took about forever for me to cut it up with my hand saw, but I was finally able to get it cut to length and split in half length-wise. Then came the great fun of lopping the corners off on the tablesaw (since I don't own a bandsaw); these cuts are always very high on the pucker-factor.

I put it on the lathe and actually managed to blow up the same piece of wood three different times in one evening. After the third time, I put down the tools, said some very bad words, insulted the tree's mother, and quit for the night without even cleaning up the shop. A couple days later, after watching several online videos and finding out what I was doing wrong that caused the explosions, I went down and was able to salvage this saucer/coaster out of the leftover piece of wood. Not much when you consider it started out as a ~11" bowl 6" deep, but a heck of a lot better than nothing. It's actually sized for the bottom of my large glass tankard and has a curve on the rim to guide the glass to the bottom to be a coaster, but looks more like a saucer now that it's done. Other people have said that it looks like an ash tray.

The grain is very interesting because, as you can see in the pictures, the wood appears as different colors depending on the angle at which you look at it, varying from nearly white to dark orange/red. There are no black 'spalting lines' that you see so soften with spalted maple, but the colors are just incredible. I have the other half of the log I cut up rough-turned to about an inch thick, soaked it in DNA overnight (had to borrow one of my mom's sauce pans for this because the bowl is too big for the gallon ice cream pail I usually use for DNA soaks), and the outside is wrapped up drying in my office. (My office is about the same temperature as the 7th level of hell due to inadequate ventilation and several computers being on 24/7 - figure it'll dry more rapidly there than in my house, where the thermostat is turned down except for about 6 hours a day.) Given how this saucer turned out appearance-wise, I can't wait to see how a 10+" bowl will look.

Natural Edge Box - Early 2011

This is another in a series of posts regarding some of my past projects.  This was done in early 2011.

I decided to make another end-grain box like the one I'd given Sandy for retirement, but saw that the pear branch I had cut off was almost perfectly round and decided to try something different as an experiment. I've seen people do natural edge bowls online, so decided to so something similar with a box. I mounted the wood and turned the box as I ordinarily would, but left the bark on - lichen and all! As you can see in the pictures, it's not 100% round, but close. (Leaving the bark on, there's not much I could do about the tree growing out of round.) When you line up the bark striations, you have to look twice to tell it comes apart; more than one person picked it up and dropped the top because they didn't notice it was two pieces. Because of a lack of planning on my part, there was absolutely no sanding done on this box; the finish isn't the smoothest, but there are remarkably few tool marks for having no sanding done on it. (Especially when you consider how little experience I have turning!) It took a light touch with the parting tool and skew to cut and not rip off the bark. I've not seen a box like this posted anywhere before and wasn't certain if it'd work or how it would look, but it turned out pretty well IMO. I wish the branch had been rounder, but that's up the Mother Nature. (I've heard people on Antiques Roadshow say that something with flaws has 'character' - that's what this non-round effect is...)

Spalted Maple Dish - Early 2011

I had a small odd-sized chunk of spalted maple left over from a larger bowl. (It was one of the corners from the half-cylindar split log.) I didn't know what the heck I was going to do with it when I put it on the lathe, but the bowl turned out so pretty that I couldn't just throw it away. Plus, it was so small that I didn't have to do any additional cutting on it - just mounted it up and started turning, ending up with this small dish. Doesn't have much spalting visible on it, but it has a little and has the spalted 'look and feel'. This is also the first project that I used my cole jaws on, so the bottom is nice and smooth, just like the rest of the bowl. The hard pins of the jaws that come with the Wood River chuck dented the rim when I turned the bottom, so I re-turned the very outside rim by mounting it backwards in the cole jaws w/Nova pins and using the tailstock live center with the point removed and a piece of folded rag to hold the bowl to the chuck jaws while turning it. Went as slow as my lathe wood go and took VEEEEEERRRRRRYYYYYY light cuts to remove the denting... I really like the cole jaws - only takes about 5 minutes to change out all 4 jaws and I can get the bottoms of my bowls cleaned up and finished like never before

Pair of Oak Dishes - February 2011

This is a series of posts regarding some past projects of mine.  These were just completed last week, so this will most likely be the last post on past projects.

A co-worker took down an oak tree in his back yard this past fall and gave me some of the wood. I haven't done anything with it until this, quite honestly because I really don't want to cut up such a hard wood with non-power saws. I finally cut up a piece of a smaller log and made a pair of shallow dishes, one slightly larger than the other and having a slight lip. Here they are with no finish.

I saw a technique in an video and decided to try it out. I took a small amount of vinegar and shredded a piece of a steel wool pad, then let it soak for 3-4 days. Bubbles would form in the steel wool over time, so I'd give the jar a little shake whenever walking by. After straining it through a coffee filter to get rid of the steel, this is the result.

I painted it on the smaller dish and according to the video, it reacted chemically with the tannins present in oak. (I'd really like to know the specifics of the chemistry at work here, as well as why the solution with no steel wool in it continued to darken for another week and now looks like red wine.) I then finished both dishes with a 1/3 BLO, 1/3 poly, and 1/3 thinner for the first coat, signed them with sharpie, then applied several coats of 1/2 poly and 1/2 thinner via wiping, scuffing with a scotch-brite pad between coats. A coat of Trewax rubbed into the surface with another scotch-brite pad and buffed off with a paper towel made the finish super-smooth. (This is my standard finishing regimen - the BLO in the first coat really brings out the grain; eliminating it from future coats makes for a faster drying finish.) Here are the results - nobody I've shown them to so far can believe that they're two halves of the same piece of log, even though many saw both dishes unfinished.