October 2014

Is it a planet? Is it a UFO? But no, in truth it is a very large wavy edge wing bowl made and demonstrated by Shaun Clifford to members at our September meeting. Very large is an understatement — see Gordon Cookson’s remarks (page 2) on that subject. And Shaun manoeuvred this lump of sycamore onto the lathe, much to the astonishment of those sitting in line with the chuck rotation!

With such a large piece of timber, truing everything up is not easy and Shaun, having done it many times before, started with the ends. The far most used tool is a swept-back gouge and to see him carving bucketful after bucketful of shavings is fascinating although the noise makes hearing his commentary difficult.