I lived by the motto, “From firewood to firewood.” This was helpful at first. I didn’t worry about perfection as it wasn’t going to happen anyway. I turned a lot of “roadkill” blanks, and when things went sideways with one of them … well, no big deal, it started out as firewood anyway, so into the burn pile it went. Turn and burn, man!

The one good thing that came out of this approach was a willingness to discard any piece that wasn’t as good as I could make it. I sign all my work, even in the early days, and I don’t want someone someday to pick up a crap bowl and see my name on it. Around about bowl #50, I had a bit of an epiphany. I wasn’t really mastering the craft but relying on a mix of skill and luck to produce a signable piece. I realized I needed to commit to a bowl, start to finish, if I wanted to become a better turner. Once I mounted a blank on the lathe, I had to learn how to deal with whatever was thrown at me. The time it took to complete a bowl wasn’t important, only the end result. It helped that I had a day job!

If the blank I cut had unbalanced grain, I dealt with it. I made a three-pin driver with two adjustable pins so that I could orient and tilt the poorly cut blank on the lathe to balance the grain. I figured out how to do interrupted cuts to true up the wobbly off-axis blank. And the next time I cut a blank, I made sure the grain was as symmetrical as it could be before it went on the lathe.

Lessons in Patience

I learned how to adjust the design of the bowl on the fly to compensate for “design opportunities” presented by bad wood and catches. I learned how to inlay splits and voids that emerged. If a bowl warped as it dried, I learned how to remount and re-turn it back into symmetry. Some bowls needed to be re-turned twice because I didn’t let them fully dry, so I learned patience.

Annular marks caused by over-pressuring the heel of the gouge were a problem — and always in the inside of a bowl. I learned to grind the heel down to minimize these marks, and I learned to float rather than pressure the bevel of the gouge.

For some reason, I like to turn spalted wood. Some spalted blanks were more “mulchy” than others — turning them required liberal use of a hardening oil or even a mix of hardening oil and varnish to stabilize them before the final turning and sanding.

Torn grain happens, and sometimes you just have to resort to an “80-grit gouge” to get rid of it. I learned to sand to 120-grit, flood the bowl with tung oil (or linseed), let it harden and then sand back with 80-grit almost to bare wood. This cuts through any turning glaze, reduces, if not eliminates, torn grain and fills in pores in the wood. Then I apply a light coating of tung oil, give it a day to harden, do a final sanding with 120-, 180-, 260- and maybe 320-grit and apply the final coat of finish.

I’m still not very fast. But my percentage of signables is way up there, and I’m fast enough to at least earn minimum wage, so I’m happy.

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I didn’t start out wanting this kind of life. Once, I was just like everyone else. I did repair jobs around the house, built sheds and decks and knocked together bookshelves using big box store lumber — just another weekend warrior. Then I took a woodturning class and learned how to make things like pens and handles. If only I’d stopped there! But no, I had to take a class on bowl turning. And I was hooked.

Accidental Success

In the early “Wheee, I just turned a round thing” stage, I was very pleased if I wound up with something marginally usable. I rarely could make two things that looked the same. And I used a LOT of sandpaper — otherwise known as the “80-grit gouge” — to smooth over poor tool-handling technique. Success was purely accidental, and the results were at best “interesting.”

The next step in my evolution from accidental to intentional woodturner was focused on acquiring good toolhandling techniques. I call it the “YouTube” stage. My goal was to produce a turned surface that could be finished with minimal sanding. I watched a lot of videos and went through a lot of firewood. After 50 or so bowls, I had the whole technique thing down pat. And I could repeatedly produce similarly-shaped objects. But the silly bowls were still ugly. Oh well, from firewood to firewood…

Technique as Means to an End

The third step was perhaps the most important in my development as a turner. I call it the “intentional design” stage. I thought about what I liked and what I didn’t in examples of other turners’ work — the proportions, rim detail, foot dimensions and overall shape. I read about the golden ratio. I looked at examples of color and patterning in raku pottery. I sketched out scale drawings of work I intended to produce and evaluated them in terms of both form and functionality. Technique became just the means to an end, and success was not accidental but intentional.

At the end of this intentional design stage, I was able to produce objects that I liked. Other people liked them too, so I was able to start selling my work. This pleased my wife to no end, because the house was getting a bit cluttered with bowls.

The fourth progression is what I call the “druid” stage. I work exclusively with locally- sourced green wood. Green wood gives you the opportunity to use the wood grain as an intentional design feature. Showcasing unusual feathered or fiddleback grain in a turned piece is done by choosing where to take wood from a tree. This requires looking past the surface of the tree to visualize what the grain looks like under the bark. I’ve also learned how to position the piece on the lathe to balance the grain of the finished piece.

See It, Do It, Teach It

The fifth and final stage is the last stop on the “see it, do it, teach it” train ride. Learning how to convey muscle-memory skills and intuitive knowledge to new and emerging turners has been fun but also very challenging. It has forced me to examine what I’m doing, understand why I do it and find ways of sharing that knowledge with others who may have very different learning styles than me. And I practice what I preach with every woodturning class I now teach.

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