Friday, June 20, 2008

QUESTION FOR WOODTURNERS

This is a special post directed to those expert
woodturners out in blogland.

My learner woodturner hubby recently
had a chance to practise on a friend's lathe.
Using what wood was available,
he cleverly woodturned these
great spoolknitter shapes.
A while later the wood started to split.
Is it still possible to make these into
spoolknitters - using woodfiller and
drilling out the centre core, sanding and
painting - without further splitting?
They were woodturned two weeks ago.

Above from left - wild cherry, stringy bark, wild cherry,
and Tasmanian oak.
Below - close-up of the head of number 1.



Above - showing the split from toe to head of
number 1.


~~~~~~~~~~~


5 comments:

Meg said...

hi there,

it's not the best pic of my knitting nancy, but you can kind of see my woodturned spool in a pic here:
http://landofmeg.blogspot.com/2008/06/snap.html
much love, meg xx

catsmum said...

you should perhaps point out that it was very well seasoned dry wood. Perhaps too dry in the case of the Wild Cherry [ alocasuarina sp. ]
btw PND opined that wild cherry is sometimes better turned green... he might have told us that earlier!

crazyhaberdasher said...

Thanks for letting us know!

François said...

Hi Marian

Sorry I didn't saw this post yet.

To avoid this to happen in the future I recommend to start by drilling the hole. This will reduce the tensions in the wood, so the probability that cracks will appear.

If the hole is drilled first then you should be able to use not-so-dry wood.

Of course if you have dry wood then this shouldn't happen at all.

Such cracks can be filled with cyanocrylat glue and wood dust (collected during sanding). Let the glue dry, then turn out the excess of glue, sand again, and you're done.

Of this helps, Francois

crazyhaberdasher said...

Thankyou so much Francois! I have shown Chris your answer and he has noted it with thanks also.