I found a way to sharpen my lathe tools that is much easier than the bench grinder. I used by 4x36 bench-top belt sander! Instead of having a multi-faceted finish on the bevel of the tool, it's now completely even and smooth. I believe it's because the belt sander has a flat surface while the grinding wheel is (naturally) a circle.
Earlier, I went out in the country and sawed up parts of a couple of fallen trees - one was blown over and was being propped up by other trees and the other was long dead. I've no idea what either is - here's a couple pictures of the smaller: <I believe that the smaller was Box Elder and the larger was spalted Maple.>
The bigger chunk that I have no pictures of it currently has some really cool spalted coloring (black and red randomly patterned lines) where I cut it. Bad thing is that when I put it down on my back patio, a bunch of large black ants dropped out. I pried out as much of the rotten area as possible and then dusted it with ant killing power. If I cut around the rotten parts and they extend into the wood as one would expect from how the outside looks, I think I'll be able to get 2-3 bowls out of it. (Or bowl blanks - whether they actually become bowls remains to be seen.) It'll probably take the rest of my life to cut it up by hand... took over 20 minutes to saw through in the woods! If they look as cool as I think they might, I'll head back and saw off more of the log; it's 20' or more long and I took about 18" of it.
I cut a couple of 3-4 foot chunks of the smaller one and put part of one of them on the lathe tonight. (This is the first time I've returned to the lathe since the last time, when the wood flew off the faceplate.) The bark fell off in the woods on the underside, but the top side was still well adhered. I turned between centers again this time and actually made something semi-useful!
This is my first attempt at making a wooden mallet. Actually, stated more properly, it's the end result of my 20th or 30th attempt, but is the first piece of wood I tried making one out of. Because of a catch and tenon break, I had to leave the head-stock marks in the end.
While making it, I discovered a new-to-me way to use a skew chisel that resulted in a much finer surface than when using a gouge. After making the wood round with the gouge, I put the skew on the tool rest in a vertical orientation with the point on the bottom, moved the tool handle to the right so that the bevel rubbed on the blank, and then pulled the handle towards myself until the tool started cutting the wood. I slowly moved this to the left along the blank. The cut that resulted was better than anything I've achieved with a gouge so far, but I've never seen this technique presented in any instructional videos. It caught a couple times when I got lax and let the angle change, but overall it worked very well.
Finally, I found a hazard of turning wood from downed trees out in the country. I chewed up no less than 5 lead shotgun pellets that were embedded in the short chunk of wood! Some were near the middle of the log and others were relatively near the surface. All had wood healed around them, so there's been a heck of a lot of lead flying around out there for a long time. Thought it was a nail at first when I saw the shiny spot and was relieved that the tool wasn't ruined by it, but then dug it out and saw what it was. By the last one, I just kept turning and turned it into shavings along with the rest of the wood.
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