Margaret Garrard was our demonstrator for our May meeting and as well as a good turn out of club members we had nine visitors come along as well.
We all hope they enjoyed their visit to us and might consider joining us as members in the future.

Margaret had a full program planned and it started with a demonstration of involuted turning to make a "Christmas tree ornament".
It starts off with four precisely cut lengths of wood glued together with paper inserted between the pieces to make splitting apart later easier to do. You need to have steb drive and running tailstock centres to hold the piece between centres to avoid prising them apart when mounting them in the lathe or hold one end in the chuck and a ring centre in the tail stock.
The piece is then turned to the design you have decided on for the inside of your ornament.
This completed and sanded it was taken off the lathe and the pieces split apart to be turned inside out to turn the outside shape.
Be sure to number the sections before you do this so that when you reassemble them they go back in the right order.
Remount it between centres and turn a chucking spigot on the base end. Take it off the lathe and remount it in the chuck and support the tailstock end while removing most of the wood when forming the final shape, only taking it away to make the final cuts to finish the end.
Part it off as close as you feel is safe then make the final parting cuts with a fine saw.

Margaret’s second project was a pencil pot with inserts of a different material around the waist.
She mounted a block of ash between centres and turned it to a cylinder with a chucking spigot at one end. This she mounted in the chuck with a running centre at the tailstock and turned it roughly sphere shaped and drew a pencil line at the centre along which she was to position the inserts, in this case coloured pencils. Once satisfied with the shape she took away the running centre and drilled a hole about 50mm diameter to roughly 3/4 of the depth of the pot.
Next she fitted a drilling jig(home made) to the tool post that line up with with the centre line of the pot and drilled holes on an even pitch around the waist.
Next she inserted different coloured pencils in each and cut them off close to the surface of the pot. Once they were all in she carefully turned them down and finishing with a fine cut and sanding them down to a silky finish. The it was just a matter of parting off.

Margaret’s final project of the day was to be a thin bowl decorated using airbrushing to paint a picture, in this instance a poppy, followed by piercing a lacy pattern around the outer edge but time was running out so she got as far as turning a very thin bowl and transferred a picture of a poppy on the inside.
This she did by first tracing a picture of a poppy on to tracing paper then going over the back entirely with a soft lead pencil.
This was then positioned in the bowl and the outline gone over leaving the imprint on the bowl.
Next she highlighted the petals and some of centre detail with a marker pen. Cover you outlines with a masking material such as FRISK or ULTRA MASK. Using a craft knife cut away small sections at a time and started painting with the air brush kit.
To get darker shades Margaret just removed small sections of the masking using a craft knife giving the exposed sections extra coats of this very fine spray. She did just a small area of piercing using a high speed dentists drill, (very noisy air compressor!!). This caused the edges to burn but a dremmel kit runs at a slower speed and would not burn if you don’t like this effect (or you can’t afford to buy a dentists drill kit and compressor!!)

The next club meeting is on Saturday 10th June and Paul Howard is with us for the day. A quick look at his web site shows a variety of work so it looks like another interesting day for us. Well you lot. I won’t be there because I will be sunning myself, hopefully, in Jersey. Then on my return I am due to visit the hospital to have a finger straightened and no, a swift clout with a sledge hammer will not fix it. See you all when I’m looking at you.

Graham