Monthly Archive for October, 2010

Details, details

Published on October 29, 2010 in Finishing and Woodturning. 3 Comments Tags: , .

Burning veins into the leaf.

We recognize a leaf by more than its shape. There’s veining and color as well. Time to add those things.

I could see the veins clearly in the original photo, so I added them with pyrography—burning freehand sweeping curves into the wood with the skew-chisel-shaped handpiece you see in the photo. I kept the heat relatively low, about 4 on a scale of ten, so lines would stay narrow and sharp with minimal charring of the surrounding wood.

Coloring with water-based dye.

Coloring the leaf with water-based dye.

Once I was satisfied with the veining, I laid down an overall color wash using water-based dye. Since the background color of the leaf in the photo seemed to be yellow, I used W.D. Lockwood’s Canary Yellow dye. This is a water-soluble powder that I mix up and keep in concentrated form in squeeze bottles. Then, when I need some for a project such as this, I dilute the concentrate with distilled water. I like to keep the dye a bit weak, since I can always put on more coats to get a stronger color, but it’s a little harder to evenly remove too strong a color. In the photo, I’ve stained half the leaf so you can see the effect relative to bare wood.

Leaf with background color drying.

Water-based dyes raise the grain, so I lightly sanded with my final grit (#220) to cut off the whiskers between coats.

At left you can see the leaf as it looked on the drying mat when this stage was complete. The veins show nicely through the yellow dye. Note that the branch area, at about 2:30 in the picture, took the dye differently from the rest of the plate. This would also be an issue later, when time came to apply a finish.

Next, adding detail colors.

Back to nature—cutting leaves on compound curves

Published on October 27, 2010 in Woodturning. 6 Comments Tags: .

The leaf template on the upside down bowl.

The hard part of cutting turned plates into interesting shapes is getting the outline onto the plate. My autumn leaf was a photo, and Illustrator turned it into a two-dimensional cartoon. But the plate surface was a compound curve.

I started by superimposing on the leaf cartoon a pair of concentric circles. One just enclosed the leaf. the second was just a little larger than the base of the plate I’d turned. I printed out the diagram full size—about 8″ in diameter in this case.

I cut around the central circle with scissors, so I could lay the diagram over the bottom of the bowl, as shown above. If the surface had been flat, I could then have just glued the printout to the wood and cut along the lines. But that wouldn’t work here.

Saral transfer paper

What did work was a modern kind of “carbon paper” (if you’re old enough to remember typewriters) called Saral. This is a wax-free transfer paper, available in several colors (to work with light or dark surfaces). You can order a free sample pack here to try it out.

I held the printout in place on one side of the plate, then slipped the Saral sheet under the other side and traced over the leaf outline in that area, transferring it onto the plate surface. Then I just worked my way around the plate, until I had transferred the entire outline.

Cutting out the marked plate.

With the outline on the plate, I could stretch things here and there to better fit my turning. I wanted to be sure to include that branch knot you see in the foreground of the photo. When I was satisfied, I set the plate upside down on my scroll saw table and cut along the lines. All the way around without breaking a blade! (I don’t use the saw much, so I’m not that good at it, generally).

Next, adding leaf details.

An autumn leaf plate

Published on October 22, 2010 in Finishing and Woodturning. Closed Tags: , .

A turned autumn leaf plate

Recently, a turning class student asked how to make sculptural turned plates, such as the (approx. 9″) plate at the left. The answer involves bowl turning, cutting, woodburning, and coloring—enough stuff to make it interesting. As it happens, I need to make something such as this for my turning club’s “seasonal” project next month. The next few posts will take us through the creation of such a plate.

The features of the plate are its shape and color. This means selecting a wood without distinctive grain so it won’t compete for attention.  I chose birch, a light and relatively soft wood that turns well, though it can fuzz up a bit.

The birch plate, ready for processing

The first step was to turn a plate—an open form with a shallow foot. This would give me the overall shape, and would allow the finished piece to actually hold something—candies or cookies, perhaps. I sanded all surfaces to #220. If you look closely at the picture on the left, you’ll see a tiny crack hear the rim at the 1PM position. I’ll have to plan my cutting around it.

The plate bottom, showing a small foot and the crack.

I need a “seasonal” theme. Around my home, leaves are turning from summer green to autumn flame, so a brightly-colored leaf seems perfect. A quick search through Google Images for a large “autumn leaf” yields lots of choices. I download a picture of a grape leaf with a shape I like, and print it out, above. This gives me a reference for color and vein position.

I open the leaf image in a drawing program (Adobe Illustrator, in this case), and have the software trace the leaf for me, so I can isolate it from its background. Then I can smooth and simplify the illustration to produce an outline I can use to cut out the leaf.

Next: cutting out the leaf shape.

I see the light!

Published on October 11, 2010 in Lighting. 6 Comments Tags: .

IKEA's JANSJO desk lamp, as it comes in the box.

Somehow, there’s never quite enough light where I want it. So I fix that problem with task lights. But incandescent lamps are hot and inefficient. Halogens are brighter, but HOT!. Both are big enough to get in the way sometimes. CFLs make poor spotlights, are heavy, and present recycling problems. What to do?

I attended the Ornamental Turning Society’s annual meeting in San Jose a couple weeks ago, and Bonnie Klein mentioned a great solution she’d found. Compact, cool, bright, and cheap! What’s not to love? I tried it and do love it. Here’s the deal.

IKEA (no connection to me) sells a little $10 LED desk lamp called the JANSJO that’s perfect for adapting as a shop light.

The lamp/base connection

By itself, it’ll do fine sitting on a workbench or beside a tool where you need light. Just assemble the kit. But the neat thing about this product is that the lamp head and long flex support attach to the base (that big black disc in the photo above) with the two threaded prongs you see at left. Better still, the power cord does not pass down into the base through the gooseneck support, but exits just above the base. It’s that thin cord you see at the left.

This makes mounting to any machine easy. As you see in the drill press picture below, all I had to do was measure the separation of the two threaded prongs with a caliper, then scribe a couple lines that distance apart on my mounting bracket. Although the prongs are metric, a 1/4″ drill makes holes just the right size to accept those prongs with a tiny bit of wiggle room. (Of course, if you’re outside the USA, you probably have metric drill bits in your kit already. But somehow we’ve never figured out how to convert tools to metric here in the USA).

It's bright, it's cool, and it's easy to position.

The prongs project out about 1/4″ inch, so they need some washers on the back of a mounting bracket to hold the lamp tight. I found that many (but not all) #10 washers will just fit over the prongs. So I cut a piece of 1/8″ sheet steel, about 6″ x 2″, and drilled holes to fit the motor mounts on my Delta drill press. I marked and center-punched holes for the lamp’s prongs, then drilled them with a 1/4″ drill. I then deburred the holes, cleaned the steel, and sprayed it with black enamel to fend off rust and make it blend in.

The bracket bolted easily to my left side motor mounts, and positioned the lamp at a good height, but out of the way when not needed. As you see in the shot above, it casts a lot of light, and doesn’t cook my left hand as I work at the drill press.

These are great little lamps, and I’ll be picking up more at IKEA when I’m in the area.