For The Love Of Wood

As the mind becomes less rigidly bound, it goes beyond the shop and your own projects and wonders what it is like in other wood turner’s shops. Working in isolation is satisfying but always in the back of your mind are a few nagging questions. Has some one else done this before and done it better or easier? Could I save some time by not re-inventing the wheel myself? How do others express their creativity? With these thoughts in mind I wish to share my experiences with another woodworker.

I first met Dustin Coates over Christmas holiday in December, 2007. My daughter, who lives in Etna, New Hampshire sent me an article from the local paper in Hanover which did a feature article on him. Knowing of my interest in wood turning and my planned holiday visit she thought I might be interested.

Was I ever! The picture showed a pick up truck at Dustin’s shop, which is just two miles up the road from where my daughter lived. On this truck was a piece of burl which was so big that they had to hitch a tractor to it to pull it off the bed of the truck. This was more than enough to whet my interest.

I wasn’t sure what I would encounter driving up to his shop unannounced. As I pulled in, my eye fell on the most marvelous assortment of logs, burls, pieces of equipment and other objects, peeking out of the rapidly melting snow.

There was no one in his little studio but my eye immediately fell on row after row of beautiful burl wood bowls. Clearly I was dealing with someone with a refined eye and sensitivity to wood which I shared.

Back outside I encountered Dustin, a huge ox of a man with a gentle, wispy, full-faced beard and dancing blue eyes set in a very kind face. When he smiled, which was often, his whole face lit up with pleasure. I explained that I had read the article in the paper about him and that my daughter lived just down the road. I mentioned that I was a wood turner as well and would be interested in seeing his shop. Here I was, a perfect stranger, interfering with a working man.

If he minded, Dustin did not let on as he took me around his shop. The piles of wood in the yard were in seeming disarray but as he showed me around, it was clear that he knew where every piece came from, a story about the wood, and an intended purpose for all of it. He spoke in loving terms about a 150 year old gigantic walnut limb or a burl he bought from one of his many lumberman contacts. To the casual observer, the wood lot was chaos but in Dustin’s mind it was as orderly as it could be.

If the lot was impressive, I was not prepared for what I saw inside his workshop. In room after room there were rough turned bowl blanks stacked from floor to ceiling. In some areas we were walking on them. These were newly turned green blanks which had been buried under wood shavings to slow the rate at which they dried, in order to prevent cracking.

There was just enough room to get to the various lathes. Some of the lathes were quite old but they were still very functional and much sturdier than many modern machines.

I noticed nests of rough turned bowls where many bowls had been cored from a single blank. This was a technique I had not yet mastered. To make a fifteen inch bowl I would reduce the insides to sawdust.

I mentioned to him that I was interested in learning how to core bowl blanks and could see that he had certainly mastered the techniques. When you work with burl, you are working with expensive material and need to maximize the use of the precious resource.

I asked about the tools he used for this purpose. His response was: “Here, I will show you how to do it.” With this he picked up a round chunk of wood, mounted it on his antique lathe, installed the coring device and before my very eyes in less than five minutes produced a perfectly cored bowl blank with the center of the blank preserved to core yet another bowl blank.

It looked so easy that I got him to give me details on what tools to order. His advice was very practical and he saved me from purchasing inferior tools and from getting more tools than I needed for the job I needed to do.

Now I have cored over one hundred blanks myself. I made trips to his shop that summer to pick up pointers on the finer aspects of coring. These he gave as freely as he did his time.

For a slow learner like myself, listening to Dustin is a bit like trying to get a drink of water from a fire hose. He has so much imagination and so many ideas packed in that head of his that they come rushing out at a prodigious rate. I just wish I could remember a third of the tips and ideas he shared with me.

Days spent with Dustin are always too short, and he never seems to be in a hurry to see me go. It is when I leave that his generous nature begins to come into full force. The first time I left, he innocently asked me if I had any use for a piece of crotch butternut wood.

Now, butternut is not a native species where I live in Maryland so I gladly accepted. When we went to the log, it was huge. It was so big, in fact, that it took both Dustin and another burly wood cutter to pick it up and place it in my Honda, where it completely filled the trunk.

Each time I visit it is always the same ritual. This summer it was another large butternut log, end pieces of beautiful burl woods and some buckthorn. Last time it was honey locust logs, more burl scrap pieces and some lilac wood.

Who, but Dustin Coates would have lilac wood? I’m talking about the woody stem of the flowering lilac bush. The insides of this wood were a beautiful reddish purple color. When I made pins out of them and applied friction with sanding, the aroma was very heavenly.

So, if you ever find yourself in Hanover, New Hampshire, take a trip down Trescott Road to visit Dustin in his shop and studio. Or drop him a line at 5 Trescott Road, Etna, New Hampshire 03750. Dustin is too busy turning to bother with computers, but he may answer the phone at (603) 643-3499 when he is not in the shop. If you are anything like me, you will find it an unforgettable experience and you may come away with one of his beautiful, burl bowls to treasure for a life time. He is truly a New England Treasure.

Photos by my son, Todd Smith. Prints are available for sale on his website.

Sharpness, whether of mind or of tool is a very important quality. While I always was interested in knives, whittling, and model building as a youth, my efforts never seemed to head in any particular direction or produce any significant product. At age 37 I happened to learn the Transcendental Meditation technique and things began to change. I became more efficient with my time in my medical practice and was able to do twenty percent more work in much less time. What this did was free up time for me to pursue other fields of interest.

The result was an explosion in my interest and abilities in the field of woodworking. I ended up being to make museum quality reproductions of 18th century antiques after several years of spare time work in my garage/shop. I was able to do this without apprenticeship or long hours of study. I simply picked it up out of books.

What I learned later is that this mental technique enables you to use your whole brain. Our educational system teaches us how to use parts of the brain very well but other unused areas begin to become less functional. The brain is analogous to an old fashioned PBX switchboard with cords that plug into a board to complete a call circuit. If you are not connected to the board, your call cannot go through. Like that all of our one hundred billion neurons are connected to hundreds or even thousands of other cells in the brain. These make a neural pathway. Each time we use that pathway, the stronger it becomes. When we don’t use it at all, the neurons disconnect from each other just like pulling the cord out of the PBX board. So, not using part of your brain over time causes loss of what that part of the brain can do for you. Use it or lose it, is the saying.

So whether it be the practice of a profession or a hobby, you need to use your whole mind. As I began to use more of mine, I was delighted to discover hidden potential in the area of woodworking and it has brought me immense pleasure. Now my woodworking had a direction and a functional and useful product.

Most woodworkers work with wood because they prefer it over metal. Yet working wood involves the use of metal tools and that requires some knowledge of metal. Metallurgy has made tremendous strides in the past several decades. Now it is possible to make gouges for bowl turning which will last three to six times longer before needing sharpening compared to the old high carbon steel tools. HIgh speed steel and powdered metal technology produce very hard steels and this is why they last longer. Yet, due to the hardness, the old methods of sharpening using water stones and other soft sharpening stones will no longer work. The steel is too hard and wears away the stone too quickly. So power grinders and diamond hones are now required.

There is still a place for the old high carbon steel tools, however. The softer the steel, the finer you can draw out the cutting edge before it breaks. Hard steels are brittle and soft ones are more ductile. You may remember the high carbon steel kitchen knife that your grandmother had. It would take such a keen edge but she sharpened it after every use and maybe a time or two during the cutting. So if you need an extremely sharp tool, high carbon steel still fills a need.

Every one wants to plunge right in and do something. A teen ager wants to drive before he knows the rules of the road. A medical intern wants to do the procedure before he knows the indication. Woodworkers are ready for their first cut as soon as the get the tool home. Later they say the tool no longer works and they will have to get another one. I had an old fishing buddy when I was in medical practice. He was a surgeon and money was not a great object to him. He had a lovely boat on which I spent many pleasant hours off of the Virginia and Carolina capes. On board one day I was inspecting his knives and remarked that they were dull. He said he knew it, and had to get some new ones and throw those old ones out. “Why not sharpen these?”, I suggested. He replied that you can never get a sharp edge on them like when they came from the factory. I told him I thought I could sharpen them. He said to not waste my time because I could never get them really sharp.

Now, I had been sharpening knives since I was old enough to carry one and it sounded like a great challenge to me. I brought my grandmother’s old Arkansas stone on the next trip out to sea, and set to work. The edges on these knives were completely rounded over so that when you looked down with the edge pointing towards your eye, the edge was shiny-bright and rounded, the hallmark of a dull edge. It took a while but I was able to produce an edge which would shave hair, the mark of a very sharp knife. My friend was completely amazed as he really believed that you could not restore the factory edge.

So if a tool is made of steel, you can find a way to sharpen it. To do it properly you must know what kind of edge you want . This just takes time and trial and error. The important thing is to start. You will make some mistakes at first but in time you will master the skill. Working with a dull tool takes more force and this can result in injury. It also takes more time and gives inferior surfaces. There are many books on sharpening and many jigs and tools to make the process easier and more foolproof. There are lots of little things you will learn along the way. At the grinder, when small sparks begin to pass over the top of the tool instead of just passing under the tool, then you have reached a sharp edge. I learned that from a book. It makes perfect sense, but I would never have figured this out on my own.

I never had very good luck using a skew chisel. It is one of the hardest turning tools to master. My chisel would dig too deep and leave divots where large chunks of wood had been torn out even though this tool is supposed to produce the smoothest edge possible.

Almost a year ago I joined a local wood turners club in my area. It was a good move on my part because now I was surrounded by people with lots of skills and a desire to openly share knowledge and techniques. One of the functions of our club is to bring nationally known turning experts for a demonstration. The first one I attended focused on using the skew chisel for spindle turning–that is, turning with the grain of the wood running parallel to the bed of the lathe. Chair rungs and tool handles are examples of spindle turnings, as opposed to wooden bowls, which are called face plate turnings. Face plate turnings get their name because they are mounted on the lathe by a faceplate, which fastens to the headstock of the lathe.

The first thing the demonstrator did was to emphasize the importance of having a very sharp skew chisel. He proceeded to show us his diamond hone. Even though the tool had been sharpened on the power grinder, it was not ready for use. He made several passes on the 1200 grit side of the diamond hone and then showed us a piece of soft wood with some dirty marks on it. Actually it was wood to which a fine diamond paste had been applied which was of much finer grit than his hone. He stropped the chisel on the diamond impregnated wood several times. The dirty appearance of the wood was due to steel that had been removed from the skew.

He then showed that the skew would shave the hair on the back of his hand as neatly as a razor. Next he proceeded to turn a flawless spindle reproducing the model he brought with him. It seemed so effortless. I still had my doubts and went up to him after the demonstration and explained my problem. He said it was probably due to my skew not being sharp enough from the grinding wheel. I returned home and acquired the diamond hone and diamond sharpening compounds and went to work on my skew. While I am still not as good as the demonstrator, I am getting much better results than before.

So to be good at this, or any other thing for that matter, sharpen well. Get a technique to sharpen your mind because that influences every thing you do. We all have many skills but if they are covered up by stress, we will never know we had them. In wood turning, get the techniques to make your tools very sharp. The beauty of techniques is that, when used as directed, they work for any one.

Over the years in my travels around the country I have accumulated a lot of wood. My wife says that I am a wood magnet and wood just naturally is attracted to me. Here I am holding a bowl blank made from what I call Broadway maple. All my wood has a story and since I come from the tradition of southern story tellers, here is the story of Broadway maple.

Actually I live on Broadway Road in Lutherville, Maryland. It is farmland which has given way to development in more recent years but still retains the open feeling of the country. Every day I would pass by this tree in a neighbor’s yard on Broadway Road and noted that it was dying. Several large limbs including one in the crown had begun to decay. We have had some very dry summers here in Maryland and the stress finally got to this tree.

I had the thought to stop by and ask the home owner if I could have a piece of the wood when they cut the tree down. I even thought of offering to cut it down myself. Since it was situated on the corner of the lot with utility poles on two of the four sides, and being 69 years of age, I thought the better of the idea. I stopped by several times but I never could catch anyone at home.

Then in early February I saw the professional tree cutters taking it down. I have missed my chance I thought to myself and drove on. However, when I passed by the next day I saw that the tree service had removed the small limbs but the trunk was still lying there. Maybe I still have a chance, I thought, and resolved to stop by that evening and beg for a piece of the tree. As I headed out the door that evening my wife suggested that I take a pencil and paper and write them a note in case they were not home. Although this was the sixth time I had gone out to make contact with the tree owner, I doubt this practical idea would have ever occurred to me. It did occur to my wife. Sure enough, no one was home. So I wrote a note saying that I was a neighbor just up the road and asked if I could have some of the wood.

The next morning, early, I got a phone call from the owner who said I could have as much as I wanted as it was just going to be hauled up to Pennsylvania and cut for firewood. He said that I had better hurry as the tree expert was coming with a big truck to haul it away that very day. In another thirty minutes he called me back. It turns out that the tree expert was very happy not to have to haul the wood to Pennsylvania and would be happy to deliver it to my yard a mile further up on Broadway Road. He would bring me the whole tree. It was a very old silver maple, about three and a half feet in diameter at the stump.

My next obstacle was my landlord. I rent a small home from him which is right next door to his home. He is a retired lawn care business owner and keeps the premises looking like a park. I had some reservations about dumping this huge tree on his lawn. However, he has gotten too old to cut fire wood for his wood burning stove, but loves the heat from it in the winter months. So I explained to him that all the wood I could not use I would cut and split for his use. Besides it was winter and the grass wasn’t growing anyway. I squeaked by on that logic and several days later a huge truck pulled in and, with deft motions of the lifting arm, deposited a very large amount of wood on the lawn.

It took about seven weeks to get it all cut. I could see that from the staining of the dying limbs that the wood was going to have beautiful colors in it, ranging from pinks to tans, dark brown and even some purple. As I cut into it, I was rewarded with the subtle beauty of the decay-stained wood. Maple is usually a uniform whitish-tan color, and nothing to get excited about. In this tree, as the limbs had been dying for several years, the staining products of decay had gradually percolated down through the sound wood giving the marvelous variations in color and pattern. Actually it is like chromatography where different molecules migrate at different rates of speed and thus colors become concentrated in noticeable bands. It is the same technology that chemists use to separate out molecules in a complex mixture. Here, nature did it for me for free.

Using my big 660 Sthil saw, I hacked away until I had thirty five bowl blanks. Sometimes I have trouble starting this saw because it has so much compression, and I am not as young as I used to be. Once I took the saw to the dealer and said it would not start. When I went to pick it up I inquired as to what the problem had been. The repairman was summoned and told me that there was nothing wrong with the saw. He looked down at my slender frame and said as politely as he could: “What you got there is a Paul Bunyan saw, man.” It is the second to the largest they make but I really needed the power for cutting the large chunks of wood I use.
So, now I cheat a little and spray some ether in the carburetor for slightly easier starts, and hope that my shoulder will outlast the saw.

To get a bowl blank I first cut sections of the tree using the same cut you would use to cut the tree down, that is a crosscut bolt of wood. Then that bolt is turned up on its end and cuts are made on either side to remove the heart section. This is a very important step as the tight rings near the center of the tree always split when the wood dries. This leaves the two halves, missing the heart section. Then I cut the slab off the outer part of the bolt so it will lie flat. Using a large compass I scribe the largest circle I can get from that piece and then either use the chain saw or the shop band saw to cut off the corners until the blank is roughly a round shape.

This round disc of wood is mounted with screws to a faceplate on the lathe, while still wet, and turned to get the outside shape. It is then remounted in a special chuck with jaws that grip the plug, or tenon as it is called in woodworking, to turn the inside shape. As the wet wood spins on the lathe, the water flies out due to the centrifugal force, and may give off quite a spray. Yet turning green wood is so much easier than turning dry wood that this is not much of a bother. Wet wood only has sixty percent of the hardness of dry wood. So the wood turning gouge just slips through that wet wood and produces shavings up to a foot long and the whole process goes quickly.

The next step is to put the bowl blank, that has been rough turned and left thicker than normal, in a place to dry. After trying all kinds of methods, I have come to favor just putting it in a paper bag and closing it up and leaving it for months or longer. I find the chemicals used to speed drying are offensive, change the character of the wood and are not all that effective in preventing checking, or cracking, of the bowl wall due to uneven drying. The paper bag acts like a little air chamber to make the drop in humidity less drastic than the outside air.

When it is dry as you see in the picture above, it is ready to be remounted to the lathe and turned true, and to final dimensions. As the wood dries it warps and is no longer completely round. The extra waste wood you left on when it was turned green is enough to allow the bowl to be turned true again before final shaping and finishing.

Many months later, I delivered a finished bowl and some implements and a rolling pin to the wife of the tree owner as I had promised. Her eyes almost popped out of her head. She exclaimed in a very loud voice: “I had no idea that beautiful bowl was in that old tree”

So, my point is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To her the dying tree was an eyesore and to her husband it was a liability as it might fall and damage the neighbors plantings. To me it was a treasure, as I thought it would be. To my landlord it was a warm winter, although he did get a little nervous about me getting up the sawdust that covered over the grass after I was done sawing.

The other thing I have learned is that much wood is available in the city just for the asking. Timber people seldom are interested in just one tree and they are fearful that it may have nails or wire buried in it from living in close contact with humans. It can damage their expensive saws and planers. Many times, people will feel that you are doing them a great favor by taking the wood away. Otherwise, much beautiful wood just ends up in landfills or fireplaces.

So keep a weather eye on the neighborhood. Suburbia is dotted with fine trees, all of which will have to come down sooner or later or fall heir to some natural disaster. If you share the finished product with the donor of the tree, then they will be most appreciative and will probably keep you in mind when they hear of another tree that needs to come down.

Welcome to a blog for those who love wood.

I fell in love with wood and woodworking when I was very young. I used to love to “twiddle”.

Today, my wife calls me the “wood magnet” and my whole family seems to agree. I simply, unabashedly love wood of all kinds, sizes and sources and I seem to gather it everywhere I go.

I especially love to find a use for wood that would have otherwise been abandoned or been burned.

Local woods, often in a neighbor’s back yard, are the ones I like to favor. No shipping, no rain-forest destruction, just enjoyment of the final gift a tree can give.

In fact, I love every stage of a tree’s development. I love to plant trees, and have planted many fruit and nut trees in the many places I have lived. I love to watch them grow. And it’s a joy when they flower and give fruit. I love the shade of trees, and I love to wander in the woods.

When a tree falls or needs to be taken down, I love to cut it and discover the beautiful pattern of its grain beneath the bark. And of course, I love to shape a bowl or a useful kitchen implement from the wood.

I hope you will enjoy this blog with me, as I share my appreciation for everything about wood.