I apologise to our Chapter members for my
failure to keep you all up to date for a number of months past. I was preparing to move house, then moving
house and on top of it all I became ill and spent some time in hospital. I am, thankfully, slowly but surely
recovering. Thank you to my many friends
within the Chapter for your kind concern that was shown in so many different
ways. A special thank you to Chairman,
John Ahern, for filling in some stuff on our web page and Facebook page.
Our September workshop was back in Tony
Farrell’s workshop and studio. As usual
we were well fed and Tony’s now famous delicious ham was better than ever. Alice and her team did us proud yet again.
Tony took us through the intricacies of
turning a hollow form. He showed us
first some pieces he had made over the years and with his usual straightforward
approach was happy to show us a few that didn’t work out quite as well as
expected.
He mounted on the lathe a piece of a birch
log that was still wet and which he had harvested from the bottom of his own
garden. After getting through the bark
and other imperfections the white streamers fairly flew from his tools. He was soon down to a good cylinder and it
was time to remount that on his chuck.
Recommending a set of gripper jaws he was very soon hollowing from the
end grain. Like the great demonstrator
that he is we were shown a variety of hollowing tools, from the Woodcut to the
Simon Hope small hollowing tool.
After the break, including the judging of
the monthly competition, we were back to the workshop where Tony took us
through his preferred finishing process.
In the course of that discussion he
introduced most of us, who hadn’t heard of it before, to Osmo PolyX-Oil. It is now much favoured by furniture makers
and is available from Pat McDonnell Pints.
There are a number of different finishes and I include a photo of a tin of one of them, as promised. The price is,
I understand, about €25.00 per tin.
For whatever reason I turned up at the
demonstration without my camera and I now await copies of photos taken by Alice
so that I can share them here, together with detailed results of the
competition.