Hi Everyone!
I started turning almost 20 years ago after receiving a birthday gift of an "Intro to turning" class from my wife. I had always been fascinated by turning after watching my father turn bed posts on his 1950's ShopSmith. I thought the class was great fun, so purchased a HF lathe to see if it was something I wanted to do in addition to my other woodworking. A couple of years later, I upgraded to my current lathe, a Nova DVR XP.
Unfortunately, I can't claim 20 years of experience turning, though. After retiring from the computer industry 9 years ago, we moved to FL and all my woodworking tools wound up in storage for 8 years. :-( I always wanted to get back to it, but for various reasons it wasn't until about a year ago that I got my tools out of storage, cleaned and brought them all back into working condition and resumed woodworking as well as turning. I've mostly concentrated since then on making small items such as urns for some of the many dogs and cats we've had or fostered ... they were deserving of something better than a small plain box! I'm having to re-learn a lot of skills, but most of it seems to come back reasonably quickly. I've tried some basic segmented turning and some (small) hollow forms, and plan to do more of both. I also recently acquired some large (for me - around 18" diameter) logs of cherry, black locust and live oak. So I now have a lot more material to experiment with.
I'll include some photos of my shop (aka garage) and some recent projects. I was able to take over the entire space with the explicit encouragement of my wife ... and she got our 2 spare bedrooms: one for her loom and one for fostering kittens. So it works out for both of us!
I started turning almost 20 years ago after receiving a birthday gift of an "Intro to turning" class from my wife. I had always been fascinated by turning after watching my father turn bed posts on his 1950's ShopSmith. I thought the class was great fun, so purchased a HF lathe to see if it was something I wanted to do in addition to my other woodworking. A couple of years later, I upgraded to my current lathe, a Nova DVR XP.
Unfortunately, I can't claim 20 years of experience turning, though. After retiring from the computer industry 9 years ago, we moved to FL and all my woodworking tools wound up in storage for 8 years. :-( I always wanted to get back to it, but for various reasons it wasn't until about a year ago that I got my tools out of storage, cleaned and brought them all back into working condition and resumed woodworking as well as turning. I've mostly concentrated since then on making small items such as urns for some of the many dogs and cats we've had or fostered ... they were deserving of something better than a small plain box! I'm having to re-learn a lot of skills, but most of it seems to come back reasonably quickly. I've tried some basic segmented turning and some (small) hollow forms, and plan to do more of both. I also recently acquired some large (for me - around 18" diameter) logs of cherry, black locust and live oak. So I now have a lot more material to experiment with.
I'll include some photos of my shop (aka garage) and some recent projects. I was able to take over the entire space with the explicit encouragement of my wife ... and she got our 2 spare bedrooms: one for her loom and one for fostering kittens. So it works out for both of us!
