Saturday, September 16, 2017

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.