Ashley Harwood: Bowl Turning Tips From Her Master Class

I'm down here in Charleston South Carolina where I've had the great pleasure Charleston Charleston South Carolina where I've had the great pleasure of taking a three-day Bowl turning class with Ashley Hart with the iconic ball Turner and I followed Ashley's work for a number of years and I've tried to emulate what she does in my own shop and finally admitted to myself that I had to go and learn for myself in real life and what I wanted to do is just share a couple highlights a few things that I've learned in this class kind of share that experience maybe provide a little teaser in case you're interested in coming down here and taking a class but there are a few things that really stood out to me that I learned one is in interning the outside of the ball and this is one of the things that Ashley's really known for is this push cut where she starts from the bottom of the ball and works seamlessly around to the rim of the bowl without disruption and I've tried to emulate that and I find that I leave a lot of marks along the way that require a lot of sanding a lot of cleanup and so when in early on in the first day of the class Ashley demonstrated it and kind of talked through what was happening and what really surprised me was the role of the left hand so that was the first big thing my left hand had been very involved with trying to control the cut and kind of working with and against the right hand and against my body and so forth and so maybe Ashley could you share why it's important to really what the role the left hand is in that cut and why it's important for me to change what I had been doing sure of course so everybody knows there can only be one chef in the kitchen right and one person driving the car it's kind of the same thing your left hand is really just a helper in the push cut it's just the assistant it's gonna be holding a tool down it's going to be helping you to position at the beginning of the car it's going to be helping you to break at the end of the cut but your right hand has all of the control it's controlling the direction of the cut it's controlling the speed of the cut it's controlling how open or close your flute is so it's controlling how aggressive the cut is going to be it's controlling everything else and I have a little demonstration to show you a little miniature demonstration here this is the only thing I use my skewed four by the way but you can see how I can use this skew and I can very easily sharpen the pencil with just my right hand controlling this skew right now what happens when my left hand tries to join in I start tearing and breaking all the fibers on the pencil because I'm now forcing that cutting edge through the wood in a way that it doesn't want to go whereas if I just let the tool cut the way it wants to cut it's much easier and I get a better surface got it same kind of idea right yeah when you are using your left hand on that it looked like my signature bowl does that okay so the I would say the next big thing that I learned and need to continue to learn as Ashley will attest is that that cut that she does that push cut requires a special 40 40 grind that has to be done unfortunately without a jig and I begged her to let me she was kicked me grind and Ashley could you maybe share why it's important to grind that way to enable that seamless kind of fluid cut yes all right so two things one thing is that with my grind I want to make sure that I have a consistent bevel angle all the way around my tools so I want the wings of my gouge at 40 and I want the nose of my gouge at 40 so I was just talking about the right hand controlling how open or closed the flute is when I'm going to cut I want to be able to continue pushing along and if I want to make that cut more aggressive I can in it if I want to make it less aggressive I can close it and I don't have to change anything else about the orientation of my tool but if I have a jig grind I'm gonna have a different battle angle on the nose and on the wings of the gouge this is an elliptical flute and a jig is gonna pivot around one point and ellipse isn't formed around one point right so that's why we're gonna have those different bevel angles if you have as different bevel angles than when you're in the cut you're pushing along if you want to open the flute you're also going to have to swing the handle away from you if you want to close it you're gonna have to swing it back towards you it's a more complicated tool to use a jig grind is easier to achieve but a more difficult tool to use the other thing that I wanted to touch on is why forty degrees so if we think about this for a second we're pushing this gauge along and we want it to travel across the surface of the wood right so let's just imagine for a second that I have a 45 degree angle on my tool if I'm pushing on the end of the handle here then that tool is going to want to go into the wood we pretend this is the wood it's gonna want to go into the wood just as much as it wants to travel forward and if I'm pushing across with this sheet of paper I'm actually gonna tear it whereas if I drop it down just five degrees all of a sudden this tool wants to travel forward more than it wants to travel into the surface of the wood so then we get that nice push that make sense it does it does it really made sense when we were doing it and I swear I heard angels singing when I find out that yeah right coming through that cut great and so the third main thing that I learned and was very surprised was I had sort of convinced myself that there were certain aspects of ball turning where I had to use a scraping cut where I would lower the wing on the gouge and just use it as a scraper and to move around corners and things like that I found it was less catchy and I knew it wasn't producing a great surface but what I learned was there there really are no situations where you have to resort to that if you use the right technique and I don't know if that if there's a tip that you can share about that type of cutting and why you worked so hard to achieve the ability to make that type of cut right so my sort of mantra that I use in my in my workshop in in my classes is I always prefer cutting over scraping and I always prefer scraping over sanding there's no shame in scraping when you have to but as long as you can cut I would prefer to cut and of course the main difference between cutting and scraping is with cutting you have the bevels support of the cutting edge versus with scraping you don't I don't ever have a need to scrape with my bowl gouge really I have scrapers for that so I'm gonna use my my bowl gouge to cut through the wood and as we discussed the 40/40 gouge is slicing through the wood it's slicing across the grain with the nose and it's peeling with the bottom wing at the same time you have that dual action going with a bowl gouge and then we were using negative rate scrapers so then we're able to it's almost a cut or it's kind of a cross between a cat and embracive you're actually getting really fine shavings rather than powder when you're using a negative rake scraper but I would use that to do any kind of cleanup that I needed to do or any kind of smoothing out cool thank you well and thank you for this opportunity to learn from you and thank you to George was on the other side of the camera for arranging this this is a dream vacation for a full Turner to come down here and learn from one of the greatest ball Turner's in the world and what a great experience and what a great area this Charleston just charleston plenty to work so thanks for watching I hope you'll click thumbs up if you liked it and subscribe to come back for more thank you so much Bob

Channel: ToolMetrix

Views: 120,206

Rating: 4.8872666 out of 5

Keywords: wood turning, bowl turning, ashley harwood, push cut, glenn lucas, how-to turn bowls, stuart batty, woodturning basics, bowl turning basics, bowl turning intro, bowl turning primer, how to turn a basic bowl, ashley harwood 40/40 grind, basic bowl turning, simple bowl turning, beginner bowl turning, intro bowl turning, how to get started in bowl turning, one handed wood turning, bowl turning tools, bowl gouge, how to do a push cut, female woodworkers, female woodturners

Id: FADm5aweKN0

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/grantd86]

I follow her on Instagram and caught one of her stories the other day where she was packing for a trip. It was pretty funny to watch her make a pile of about a dozen identical black shirts like the one she is wearing in the thumbnail. The humor wasn't lost on her either.