Eggcellent Turnings
An Assortment of Eggs Ready for Finish
Eggcellent Turnings. (Forgive me!) For the Easter season as well as the Spring clean up in the shop, I decided to kill two birds (another poultry pun) with one stone and turn solid eggs out of those cracked billets and logs in my yard. They weren’t good for anything anyway so I might as well clean out the wood pile and make something at the same time.
A number of years ago Ron Kent wrote an article in Woodturning
Magazine on the way that he turns eggs. I remembered the article
when a friend wanted an egg turned and decided to
try it. It is about as hard as crossing the road (another chicken
cliché!) and so off I went to the lathe.
Left: Starting from a very ugly piece of Mimosa. Right: Roughing to a cylinder.
I found all kinds of starting material in the wood pile, but
decided that the small pieces of Maple burl in various boxes in
the shop were a good place to start. I chucked up a
piece between centers and set about forming the egg shape. I used
a skew for part of the turning, but found that
my ½" spindle gouge worked very well for this project after a
number of catches in the soft Maple with the skew.
I also lined up some White Oak, some small Cherry burls, some
Red Cedar billets, and some spalted Maple billets that
were under the lathe.
I happened to think while turning an egg that this is a great project for mastering techniques that I use in turning the end-grained hollow forms that I have made over the years. Many of the techniques that I had to learn are used in this process and it would be a great way for a beginning woodturner to start the process without the intensity of the hollowing process stopping them in their tracks. Once this process has been successful, then the beginner could go to the next steps, but until then, they could have a very nice finished product from their efforts.
I form the egg shape from memory or I use one of my existing
eggs as a guide. At first, I found that I did better if I
form the flatter end of the egg first near the headstock
and then use the spindle gouge in a shear scrap to refine
the long end of the egg towards the tailstock. Soon I changed
my mind and reversed this since I had a lot more wood to remove
and the skew is much more efficient. I could get a
very nice curve and not have a lot of sanding in the end by
using the skew. I am not as comfortable using the skew for
a bead towards the tail stock, but I am practicing!
I have been grinding my spindle gouge with a very acute bevel
and a swept back grind on the side. I find that this grind
allows me great flexibility in detailed turnings. I can
get to a lot of spots on a bead that I used to need to use
a skew chisel to reach. I can also get to the bottoms of
hollow vessels easier using the grind (but that is another
article.) Two of the techniques that I spoke of above
are illustrated on the next page. I use the modified spindle
gouge in two ways. The first way is to use it in a
normal fashion with the cutting edge just left of the tip
with the bevel rubbing on the wood. This gives a very smooth
cut and burnishes the wood just as the skew would. The real
secret to using this part of the grind is to have the
bevel fairly acute near the point of the tool. The second
example that is illustrated is using the swept back grind on
the tool to perform a shear scrape. The tool is held at a
slight angle with the flute towards the blank and the bottom
part of the grind makes a shear of the wood from the work.
You should get a very fine dust from the tool and the
surface should be very smooth when you complete the cut. This
is a very good way to get that last bit of shape for the
project. When you master this technique, you will have much
less trouble with your bowls and other forms.
Once the egg is shaped, I sand it starting with 120 and
working up to 400 on most of the woods. I burnished the
wood with an abrasive pad. I used a sanding disk on the ends to
shape the chucking areas and then hand sanded the ends to
final smoothness. I finished most of the eggs with lacquer,
except I oiled some of the burls to get that deep tone. I
left the Red Cedar eggs without finish so I could smell them.
The photo above on the left shows the way that you can use
the fingernail ground gouge just like you would a "normal"
ground gouge. You just rub the bevel and turn away
the wood using the tip of the gouge as the cutting edge.
This burnishes the wood somewhat, just like a skew chisel
would. This is good for many projects, but probably not a
good idea for green wood since I have had many instances of
bruises that are very difficult to get out of the piece
after drying. You probably see these marks after you put on
the finish.
This is a snap of a shear scraping technique that I
learned from David Ellsworth at Arrowmont. You can use the
swept back edge of the flute at an angle to the wood to
shear away the wood. On green wood, this seems to eliminate
the bruising of the wood since the bevel is not
rubbing on the surface. This is a great way to do the final
forming of the shape of a piece. The technique can take off
a little or a lot of wood. It works best when you have more
room that you will on the egg since the piece is small
and you are chucking between centers, but it can still
be successful.
Adapted from an article by Roger Austin in the April 1997 TWNC newsletter.
Reference: Go To Work On An Egg, Ron Kent, Woodturning, No. 43, October 1993.
This article was originally published in the Newletter of the Triangle Woodturners of North Carolina, April 1997. This may not be reproduced without the permission of the author.