Today’s bowl:
Camphor Laurel and Cypress.
Mostly they’re just waxed, although there are a few that were done with friction polish (AKA shellac, linseed oil & alcohol).
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Any luck with this? Have you finished the project already? I see some options on Amazon (US) - not sure what it would cost to get them to you, or if you would just prefer not to shop with them.
I’m guessing you have a table saw - or at least a circular saw. Could you possibly make a jig to cut the slot with that? I think the kerf on a circular saw/table saw blade is usually somewhere near 1/8", maybe take multiple passes to get the width you need, or shim/glue the plastic bit in place if the kerf is bigger than 1/8"?
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Here’s a couple things I’ve been up to at work. Of course it’s CNC so computers are doing a lot of the heavy lifting. The one with the ‘tailstock’ has a bunch of stuff we hadn’t done before in our shop, so a lot of hand coding and a lot of work to do on the postprocessor so the computer can do the work next time.
Oh yeah - terrible video, I’m a machinist, not a videographer, and it shows.
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Today’s bowl:
And I’ve got an interesting lump to play with next:
Getting rid of some old plywood scrap.
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As it happens, once I’d said I couldn’t find anything for a reasonable price in the UK, I of course immediately found somewhere. I wasn’t really keen to wait for shipping from the US.
The bit arrived yesterday. Spent today removing some existing cabinets and cutting down the worktop.
I’ll start mucking about with the shelving tomorrow.
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Right on. Glad to hear you found something.
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I for one welcome our new Puppypigcuttlefish overlords.
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That’s a nice, solid looking sewing machine. What is it?
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It’s a “White” brand machine I got from a relative a while back, no idea how old it is (guessing mid-80s?)
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Ah, very nice. The White/Kenmore/Sears/Morse/Japanese knock-offs of that era are built like tanks and still very easy to find replacement parts for today since so much was interchangeable. Good stuff. Definitely looks of 70s/80s vintage to me.
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Now in black. Painting the edges in brass will take careful masking. (I’m not one of those people who can hold a card along an edge just so, and then precisely mist just the right spot with paint.)
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Finished the “brass”. A picture in daylight will probably look better. It needs a bit of polishing here and there, but that can wait for the full drying time.
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Woodturning tools are divided into two categories: gouges and scrapers. Gouges look like this:
While scrapers look like this:
Scrapers are used as the name implies; the blade points with the direction that the wood is moving, and scrapes some off as it goes. Gouges use a cutting action instead; they point the blade into the oncoming wood.
You don’t need gouges, but they produce a much smoother surface after the cut. This means that, once the cutting is done, you spend five minutes sanding instead of an hour.
However, gouges are much trickier to use, and if you get it wrong they make a big bang and a mess. The margin between doing it right and destroying your work is very small. So, they tend to be a bit intimidating for novice woodturners.
Anyway: a few days ago I finally figured out how to use gouges properly. 
So, to celebrate, I took these two things:
And made this thing [1]:
…so now I’ve made my first woodturning tools, too.
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[1] Round profile scraper with a pistachio handle. The holes are from the borers that killed the tree; for my purposes, they’re just extra grip.
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Next up: a branch from a mulga tree.
About 90mm diameter, super-dense and hard. Gonna make a set of four matched pots.
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I really enjoy your photos. There is always a botany lesson, too, you work with such exotic trees 
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With the speaker on top, it looks like some artifact of a past that never was. (That purple cable has to go.)
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