And the other thing Mahoney did...

And the other thing that Mahoney did was he practiced the motions before he made them. Or before he made the actual cut. That is, he practiced how he was going to make a cut, particularly on the outside shape, before he made the actual cut. I had never done that when I was turning.

What Mahoney did was he got the tool rest just right, got the tool just right, and then he got his feet set in a position where he was comfortable and balanced, and then he moved the tool through the complete cut he proposed to make without actually touching the wood. I can't remember whether he had the lathe running at the time or not, but then it wouldn't matter would it? He was checking to see if he could reach the full cut comfortably without moving his feet around or having to change his grip on the tool. Most of the time if you change your grip or move your feet you get a ridge or a groove in the wood. What you are looking for is a long smooth continuous cut with one motion and you can get a long smooth continuous shape on the wood. When you do it right, it is beautiful to see and do.

I have started practicing my cuts before I make them and trying to make sure I get a long smooth continuous cut. I figure if Mahoney needs to practice his cuts up on the mountaintop like that, then I can sure use every trick I can find to make my bowls better. I surely do dislike those ridges and grooves when they show up cause they take a lot of sanding to get out.

Course if I had two sanders. . . . (some people just won't let go, will they?)

Flung through the woods

I am tired of turning bad wood. When on the mountaintop with Mahoney, the other thing he said, (see previous posts) was that nobody kept a bowl made out of a piece of bad wood. Since no one was going to keep them, there was no use in making them. I have decided he is right.

My thinking in the past has been that I will not throw out a piece I have just spent several hours making after having waited two months for it to dry. Just couldn't do it. And then often as not I would end up with a flawed piece. Maybe a crack, a rough side, a hole, anything. Sometimes I would call it a piece of art (what is art anyway?) and go ahead and finish it up.

Yesterday I had a nice piece of cedar and I had trimmed it up on my new band saw into a perfect bowl blank. I waited a day or two before starting (anticipation -- remember the ketchup commercial and the song?) and when I started I thought I had a nice bowl about the size of a vegetable serving bowl, roughly eight inches in diameter and almost four inches deep. When I got the bottom flattened out, it had a pitch pocket which I thought I could cut off and still have a nice bowl left. I started cutting it out and it kept going. I cut some more and it was still there. I cut some more and it was still there. The bowl kept getting smaller and smaller and I was headed towards a soup bowl. Then it got to be a saucer and that stupid pitch pocket was still there. It was not going away and the bowl I had pictured in my mind was going away. I took it off the lathe and took the hatchet to it so I would not be tempted to salvage it and then I flung all three pieces down through the woods behind the shop to recycle it. Life's too short to fool around with bad wood.

I am trying to decide if the same idea applies to people.

10,000 Hours

I saw a book mentioned the other day which I may have to buy. Malcolm Gladwell has written a new book called "Outliers" and it is about extraordinary people. When you graph things and they all fall within a certain range, sometimes one will fall way outside the range. That one is an outlier. Best example I have seen lately is the cricket player from Australia who is the furthest out outlier I have ever seen. Go look at Wikipedia and look up Sir Donald Bradman, generally conceded to be the best cricket player in all of history. Knighted for playing cricket. More dominant in his sport than Pele in soccer, Tiger Woods in golf, Ty Cobb in baseball and Michael Jordan in basketball. Wow.

Anyway, Gladwell in his book says that the way people get to be an outlier is with at least 10,000 hours of practice. One good example is Bill Gates who accumulated his hours before he got to college. I want to be a turning outlier, so I have been trying to figure how much longer I need to practice before I get my hours. I have been turning about eight years as near as I can remember. That is 416 weeks and if I averaged 5 hours per week, which is generous, then I may have upwards of 2000 hours on the lathe. That makes me about 20% competent. That's about how competent I feel sometimes, so maybe Gladwell is right. I have more time to spend in the shop now, so I figure another four to six years should get my 10,000 and I can begin to feel as if I am somewhat competent. Then I can be rich like Bill Gates. Maybe someone will knight me.

Would you believe Zen?

I love the 1970's cult classic "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Bet you never read it, but it applies to woodworking and bowl turning and as the author, Robert Pirsig, famously declares, it is not about Zen nor is it about motorcycles. I came to it later in life since my education was technical and we had no time for all that philosophy nonsense. The book is an essay on quality and how it applies to work and about getting work done. One of my favorite parts is where the writer divides the world into two sections. See which group you fit into.

The first is those people who love to get ready to work. They set up shop in detail and they paint those outlines of all their tools on a piece of pegboard on the wall so they can tell when a tool is missing or put out of place. Drawers have felt linings (red) in the bottom so no tools get scratched when carefully placed in their prescribed location. All the tools are there in all the sizes and carefully lined from smallest to largest. The floor is tiled and waxed and has not a bit of sawdust or shavings. Everything is set up and ready to go and the owner of this shop has all the tools he needs to build anything out of wood. Probably has a neon sign on the wall that flashes "Ken's Place" or some such. Except he never makes anything because it would mess up the shop. What he really loves is getting ready to make something.

The other type is the guy who has all the tools but they are scattered all over the shop. Some are dull and they certainly don't fit in a drawer or on a pegboard. There is no red felt anywhere. The floor is covered with dust and chips. The only thing pristine in the shop is the current project sitting on the bench in some ethereal glow not explained by the overhead flourescent lighting. No signs, no tile, no pegboard, no felt -- just beautiful work in a messy shop.


Two groups of people -- one likes getting ready to work and the other likes working. Which one are you? Go read Pirsig to find out more about yourself. You will need to read it about four times but eventually you may get it, (or maybe not). I'm in the second group by the way.

Doo Rag

I'm gonna get a doo rag. I think I will be a better turner if I wear a doo rag, particularly while I am trying to get the outside shape of a bowl as nice as I can make it. I can take it off while I am roughing out a bowl and while I turn the inside, but for the real shaping and the stuff that separates the men from the boys in bowl turning so to speak, it takes a doo rag. The reason I say this is because I was watching some TV show the other day and some craftsman was repairing a door or some trim work or some such, and he was wearing a doo rag. I knew instantly from the rag that he was a craftsman and knew exactly what he was doing. The host knew it too, and we all sat around in awe while he did his thing. He did do a really good job and I think it was because of the rag. Only thing it could have been. I'm getting one now.


Did you ever think about the difference between homemade and handmade? When I was growing up we didn't have a lot of money and I can remember Mama making shirts for me and my brother out of flour sacks. If you bought 25 pounds of flour to make biscuits (Mama made biscuits every day twice a day) it came in a fabric sack of cloth suitable for making clothes. Since you had to make biscuits anyway, the shirts were free if you could make one. Mom could make one. Course we didn't like them very much because our classmates knew what the deal was and homemade shirts did not cut it even in that time and place. Remember Dolly Parton's "Coat of Many Colors". Same thing. Those shirts were handmade, but they were homemade, and that did not gain much respect.

I make these bowls at my home, so I suppose you could say they are homemade. But homemade carries a connotation that is definitely negative and I don't sell homemade bowls. Handmade carries a connotation that is distinctly positive, so all my bowls are handmade. Don't tell anybody I make them at home. I can sell them for more money.

Dust Collector

Do you have a dust collector? I worked for years in a dank basement with little light and a damp floor. As I have said before, I used to walk over a pile of chips and shavings to get to the lathe and I only cleaned it up about every three months because I hated so much to empty the shop vac. Net result is lung and nasal congestion, musty odor in the house and corrosion on the tools. Plus when you have limited time to turn, you don't want to spend it on cleaning, you just want to turn.

When I was able to start a new shop building, one high priority item on the list was a dust collector. I checked into several different brands and went with the Oneida brand. I sent them a shop layout with the tools located and with a spot picked out for the collector and they did a detailed design of the system with proper sizing of the blower and all of the pipes sized to ensure the proper flow of air from all machines. Once I approved the system, they did a detailed parts takeoff and then shipped the whole package to me in about a week. It went together pretty easily since my shop is on a crawl space and I was able to run all the pipes under the floor. It is one of the best features of the shop. It has a three horse blower (sucker?) and is connected to each machine with a valve at each one so you can direct the air flow. My favorite is the floor sweep which is an open vent with a kick open flap door. It is below the lathe and when you turn on the blower (with the pocket remote switch) and kick open the door, all that is required is to sweep dust towards the vent and it is gone. I sweep the floor these days just for the fun of it.

Shop Dignity

When I was on the mountaintop watching Mike Mahoney turn a couple of weeks ago, he said the most amazing thing. He had two sanders. I don't mean he has two electric sanders. Everybody has that. He meant he has two hired hands (people I mean) that do nothing but sand the bowls. Now you have to understand that no one likes to sand. It is boring, messy, dusty (duh), and hazardous to your health. Nobody wants to sand anything. When I heard him say it, it took me a minute to comprehend what he was telling us. He actually has two people who do nothing but sand his bowls after he makes them. Can you imagine? You just mount a piece of wood on the lathe, turn it off to a shape you like and you know will sell, and as soon as you get done with it, you take it off and hand it to the sanding person and you don't even have to apologize for that ridge in the corner of the bottom which you were too lazy to try to clean up cause you didn't want to sharpen the tool one more time. And if they want to complain about your technique, you just hire someone else.

Then I got to wondering who these sanding people must be. Is it some elderly grandmotherly type who will spend hours on every tiny pore and would sacrifice herself on a burning pyre of cracked bowl blanks if she found a scratch left in the bottom of an otherwise perfect specimen? Maybe it is a retired hippie (when have you heard that word?) who does it because it gives him just enough money to buy his weed and he can take long lunch hours and zone out with a joint and it numbs the afternoon up enough to make a little more cash to repeat the cycle. Probably has to pay him an hourly wage -- not by the hour, but on the hour, just so he will keep working, plus run another dust pipe to his work station to keep down the fumes. Or maybe it is a young couple who bring their children to work with them so they don't have to pay child care (do they make baby dust masks?) and they are saving their money to go on a world cruise. I saw a guy in the last issue of "Fine Homebuilding" who worked about two months of the year and then cruised the world in his boat with his family the rest of the year. I wonder.

You are probably asking yourself by now what all this has to do with "Shop Dignity". Well, it's like this. When I first started woodworking about 40 years ago, I worked in the basement of our first house and started with a work bench I made out of two by pine. We built a new house and I had a one car garage to fill up and soon did so. I used to pride myself on walking over the top of the pile of shavings at the lathe because it was a sign of how much work I was getting done and I really could reach the lathe better. But the big problem was I had to share all that joy with the riding lawnmower. There was no other place to put it and I was not going to leave it out in the rain. So there it sat watching me. And me nursing a growing disdain and festering hatred for its intrusion into my personal space. No woodworker should have to suffer the indignity of having to share space with the stupid lawnmower, especially one whose battery runs down every winter out of pure spite and animosity. The height of my woodworking ambition was to have a shop where the lawnmower did not live. Well, joy of joys, I inherited some money and found myself in a position to build a shop in the back yard. It is a separate building and the lawn mower is allowed to sniff around the outside, but it will never set its solid rubber front tires in my shop. At last, I have made it -- I am a real woodworker with a real shop with no lawnmower in it.

And then Mahoney comes along and has two sanders.