Woodturning FAQ

How do I get started with woodturning?

If I could go back in time and talk with the beginning turner I used to be, I’d have several pieces of advice:

1. Seek out in-person instruction. There is no substitute for this. If you don’t have other turners near you, or you can’t find them, there are woodworking schools and events where you can connect with teachers. I list just a few on my Resources page, but there are many, many more than this.
2. Seek out other woodturners in your area. Having peers to talk shop with and ask questions of is invaluable. You may have a local woodturning club. Here’s a place to check . Clubs can provide not only a peer group, but often libraries of books and videos, meetings with show-and-tell and critique, demonstrations, and also the all-important opportunities for in-person instruction.
   
   The larger woodturning community can also be a fantastic source of information, advice and support. I’d recommend a membership in the American Association of Woodturners for starters. They have a superb magazine, and a website packed with links, information and member-moderated forums.
   
   There are online turning communities as well, though they can vary wildly in their levels of focus, inclusion and usefulness.
3. If you want to turn bowls, you’ll probably need to learn how to use a chainsaw safely. There is green wood available for free almost everywhere if you have the capacity to process it. Stores that sell chainsaws often offer classes. A chainsaw can be a woodturner’s best friend, but only if you take the time to learn how to use it safely.
4. Check out my Resources page for links to online information, catalogs, and schools/events that may be of interest

What tools should I buy?

If you’re just getting started, see if there’s a maker space near you that has a turning set-up. That’s a great way to try things out before buying them. Taking classes with a club, a store like Woodcraft, a school, or at an event is also a good way to check out tools and gear before buying. It’s horribly easy to fall into mass tool acquisition and wind up with loads of gear you’ll rarely use, so I recommend keeping your purchases moderate until you know what kind of turning you plan to do.

The lathe: Used lathes can be a very good deal, but it’s wise to check out any used gear with an experienced woodturner before purchasing.  This is another way in which a club membership can be a real help, especially since the turning clubs often hear about the good deals before anyone else does.

Sets of turning gouges, though tempting, are very rarely worth buying. Much better to decide what you want to turn, which specific tool you’ll need, and then find that tool in the size you need.
For turning bowls, you’ll need a bowl gouge first and foremost. I recommend a 5/8″ diameter shaft to start with, which will be fine for both large and small work. There are a lot of different ways to shape the cutting edge of your gouge. I use the 40/40 grind (see video) for much of my work, though am also incorporating the Ellsworth grind for some operations. You may also want a spindle detail gouge to get into the crevices. 3/8″ or 1/2″ would work fine. Some folks like to use scrapers for leveling surfaces, some don’t. With a bowl gouge and a spindle gouge you can do almost everything.

For spindle turning you’ll need a spindle roughing gouge, one or more spindle detail gouges, and a parting tool. The skew is an incredibly versatile spindle-turning tool but has a slightly steeper learning curve than the others. It’s worth it.

Sharpening is incredibly important, more than most folks think when they get started, and it takes practice to learn to do it well. For turning tools you’ll need a slow-speed (1750 r.p.m.) grinder with a good tool rest, and you’ll need it right from the beginning. Your tools may be sharp when you get them, but they won’t stay that way, and turning with dull tools is both frustrating and unsafe. There’s a lot of debate about what kind of grinding wheels you’ll need. I use a 100-grit stone wheel for sharpening scrapers and a 220-grit CBN (cubic boron nitride) wheel for my gouges. I’m a big fan of the Wolverine base and platform made by Oneway. Woodcraft sometimes carries a Rikon grinder along with the Wolverine system for a reasonable price, though I’d recommend buying an additional platform. There are other good grinder platforms on the market. It’s worth shopping around.

A bandsaw is useful to both spindle and bowl turners. As with most machinery, there can be good deals on used ones. Cutting greenwood bowl blanks can be hard on a bandsaw, so it’s worth investing in a saw with a powerful motor and good cutting capacity. Good dust collection and blades designed for green wood will also help. If you’re primarily doing spindle work, you may be just fine with dry, commercially available lumber and can get by with a smaller bandsaw. The capacity of your lathe will determine the capacity you need in a bandsaw.

Bowl turners are likely to need a chainsaw, as noted above in “How Do I Get Started With Woodturning?” As with the bandsaw, the bigger your lathe is, the bigger the chainsaw you’ll need to support it. Take the time to learn how to use it safely and maintain it in good condition.

There are online sites for used turning tools, both on Facebook and within the AAW website’s member-moderated forum. You can also find turning tools listed for sale on Craigslist.

Where do you get your wood?

I live in Sebastopol, California, which is in Sonoma County, a beautiful part of the state known for great wine, beautiful coastline and rolling, wooded hills. We’re rich in excellent turning woods here, both native (such as bay laurel, madrone, oak, manzanita, redwood, walnut and sycamore) and introduced (like maples, many fruit and nut woods, elm, locust and acacia ). Almost all the wood I use is locally harvested from trees brought down by storms, age, or gravity, or taken down for reasons of health (usually theirs) or safety (usually ours).

I listen for chainsaws when I’m out and about, and watch for trucks belonging to tree crews. I’ve gotten a huge amount of wood by introducing myself to arborists and letting them know that I’d like to make something out of the tree or branches they’re removing. They tend to like to see the wood get used for something other than firewood, and will often help load logs into my truck. Sometimes I’ll give the tree’s owner a bowl in exchange. Sometimes arborists with whom I develop a good working relationship also get bowls.

Once in a blue moon I’ll buy wood if I need something really special, but that’s very rare.

My woodturning club, Wine Country Woodturners, has an excellent wood raffle at every meeting and also shares information about trees that have come down around the county, so even if one person doesn’t need the wood, others who might need it have an opportunity to harvest. Yet another reason to join your local club!

How long does it take to make a bowl?

This is a more complex question than you might think. My bowls are mostly what’s known as “twice-turned,” which means I rough them out when the wood is green, then let them dry for a long time, and then put them back on the lathe after they’re fully dry for final shaping and sanding. The reason I can’t simply store the logs or chunks of wood until they’re dry is that green (i.e. freshly cut) wood is full of water and it shrinks radically as it dries. Naturally, the outside of the wood dries out faster than the inside, and when the outside shrinks but the inside is still full of water, the outside has to crack. Those cracks often render the wood unusable. The solution is to pre-shape the wood and remove a lot of that interior bulk so that the roughed bowl can dry from the inside and outside at the same time. This process doesn’t guarantee that the wood won’t crack – I still lose a lot of bowls – but it helps.

Before I can even start roughing, though, I need to get the wood from my truck to my shop, and that often involves hours of work breaking down trees or logs with a chainsaw and then a bandsaw to create the chunks of wood (called “blanks”) that can go on the lathe. Since I tend to get wood by the log or by the tree, that’s often a full, heavy truckload of material that needs to get processed, and I’ll end up with stacks and stacks of blanks ready for the next step.

A single bowl may take just a few minutes to rough out, but multiply those few minutes by a truckload of wood and the roughing process takes a long while and is spectacularly messy. (I produce enormous piles of wood shavings in the course of roughing out bowls. I get rid of most of them using an online service called Freecycle, a sort of bulletin board for stuff that’s too weird to sell but too good to throw away. Wood chunks and offcuts that I can’t use also go on Freecycle. Nothing goes to waste.) My roughed-out bowls tend to have a simple shape, fairly thick walls (the rule of thumb is that the wall thickness should be about 10% of the bowl’s diameter for effective drying) and a tenon on the bottom that I use to grip the bowl in the jaw chuck. I don’t think too much about the final design at this point. The goal is to get the bowls hollowed, sealed, and onto the drying shelves. To seal the bowls I use a product called Anchorseal. It’s a thick, glorpy wax emulsion that I apply to the cut wood surfaces with a brush after I’ve roughed out the bowls. It slows down the water loss from the surface of the bowl, and helps keep the moisture levels of the interior and exterior of the wood closer to equilibrium. The less contrast there is between the internal and surface moisture levels, the less likely it is that the wood will crack.

A roughed-out bowl can take anywhere from 6 months (for light-textured woods like ginkgo or avocado) to several years (for dense woods like eucalyptus) to fully dry. Gauging when a roughed bowl is ready for finish turning is largely a matter of feel and experience. Some folks weigh their bowls right after roughing and then periodically thereafter. When a bowl stops losing weight, it’s dry. That seems like a lot of trouble to me, so I shelve the bowls and come back them after a year or so. I’ve gotten pretty good at telling by feel whether a bowl is dry.

The next stage is the most delicate and can be the most time-consuming. Once a bowl is roughed and fully dry I can decide what its final shape will be. A small, simple form can take less than an hour to cut, sand and finish. Larger and more complex bowls can take much, much longer. Processes such as carving or painting after the bowl comes off the lathe add yet more time.

That was the long answer to the question. The short answer is “anywhere from a couple of hours to several years.”

What’s your favorite wood?

I’m willing to try almost any wood that crosses my path. Sometimes I get lucky and it’s a wood I really enjoy, like goldenrain, box elder or loquat. Other times it’s something I’ll never willingly touch again, like palm (bristly and nasty), silk tree (made me cough for days) or pine (so much stickiness!). In general I have yet to meet a fruit or nut wood that I didn’t like, and I have a genuine love for walnut, which is at the top of my list of favorites. It has a pleasing smell and endlessly variable and lovely color and grain patterns. When it’s green, the tannins in the wood make an enormous mess of my lathe and my hands, but it’s totally worth it. Also, there’s a lot of walnut available in my area.

Other woods high on my list of favorites are:

• Madrone, which warps like mad as it dries but has a creamy and delightful texture when I’m turning it.
• Box elder, which also cuts beautifully and looks like old ivory when it dries.
• Olive and bay, which cut and sand extremely well and both of which make the shop smell glorious. Olive, like madrone, is hard to dry without cracking, but it’s worth the effort and stunningly beautiful. Bay has astonishing variety, with color ranging from gray to honey-gold to black, and a light, crisp texture that’s a joy to carve.

Will you make a bowl out of my tree?

Maybe. Trading a future bowl for a tree about to come down is a gamble for me. I need to invest a huge amount of work up front in trucking and chainsawing the log, processing the chainsawed chunks into blanks, turning those blanks into roughed-out bowls, sealing them and storing them for 1 or more years until they’re dry, and then finally getting to finish them out. Depending on the tree, when it was cut, how long it was down before I got it, and the randomness of working with living material, I might invest all that work and come out of it with only a few usable pieces, or none. I can do my best and still get completely skunked. I’m willing to set aside rough-outs for the folks who provided the wood, but there are no guarantees and it’s not a fast process.