Bowl Gouge - Which Way to Cut - Supported Grain Cutting Direction Woodturning Video

what direction do we cut with a bowl gouge [Music] [Laughter] [Music] hi i'm kent and welcome to turner wood bowl i remember distinctly when i was trying to figure out the direction of the bowl gouge cuts when i was first learning it was incredibly frustrating and no one seemed to be able to explain it people that understood it they got it but they didn't try to explain it very well and i think a couple of the problems were or one of the main problem was they're trying to look for a quick term to use to just throw out there and make everybody understand what the right direction is and there's two of them the first one is cut with the grain well most of the bowls i turn are side grain mounted that means the grain runs across perpendicular to the headstock and perpendicular to the bed so when this lathe is turned on that grain is basically just spinning so that makes no sense there's no grain going there and the grain's spinning i can't keep up with the grain spinning so what direction am i cutting doesn't make any sense the other the other term that's used a lot is just just cut down hill that's all you gotta do is cut down hill all right so if i'm standing in front of the bull blank right here and i want to make a curve for the bull bottom that's downhill oh but wait wait if i'm over here and i'm looking at the base of the pole and the rim's up here then i'm coming downhill this way both of those terms are very confusing and misleading and i would like you to try your best to just remove them from your vocabulary let's never say cut with the grain and just cut downhill because it doesn't describe what's really going on instead we need to use a new term and i would encourage you to share this with everyone else is we want to make grain supported cuts now using the term grain supported cuts doesn't create a visual in your mind like going downhill or going with the grain but it is the correct term when we use a supported grain cut we're going to get good clean cuts every time with the bowl gouge and i'm going to explain that to you today in great detail so stay with me now as tricky as those two terms are coming downhill and cutting with the grain i've got a trick question for you at the end of this video so stay tuned and i want to see if you have paid attention to the video and if you can answer the question i'll have for you at the end until then do me a favor click that like button and subscribe if you're not already subscribing click the bell you'll be notified when new videos come out all right so let's take a look at this for a second up close another thing that's important to note is there are a couple cuts we can make on a standard side grain full blank that really aren't supported grain dependent or supported grain direction cut dependent and let me show you those up close and in detail i'll make the cuts for you when we're turning a blank like this essentially the end grain is what we're most concerned with the way that we cut through this end grain is what's important and when we're making an end cut here just to square up the end of a bull blank because we're going 90 degrees perpendicular through that those end grain the direction of which we cut doesn't matter a tremendous amount so if i were to come in here and make a cut from left to right i can do that i can also come in here and make a cut from right to left either one of those cuts is going to do just fine when we're perpendicular to the end grain now keep in mind this is no different than any other wood that we use for a wood project if there's nothing on the end of this wood and i cut through it the there's going to be torn out in green fibers and that's what we're trying to prevent so let me show you what's going to happen there if i were to make this pass all the way across right there you're going to see what what happens when you have unsupported grain there was nothing on the outside of this full blank supporting these end fibers so they were ripped and torn off on both sides of the bulb length you can see right here they were torn that's what we're trying to prevent okay so one way to get around that is to make a cut that goes across instead of going through make a cut from the other side coming in and that'll help keep those ingredients from being torn out on the end of the bull blank so when we make a face cut when we come across the face the same thing is true so if you think about the layers of wood in a side green bulb blank that's what this is a side grain bowl blank most bowls are turned side grain there are in grain full blanks and you can turn a bowl in grain and i'll show you an example of what the conditions that we're talking about how that pertains to the ingredients but for the most part most of our bull blanks are side framed that means the grain is actually running sideways through this this blank so if you think of the of the layers of grain just stacked up a face cut is essentially just removing the top layer so it's not as dramatic as making a curved cut that we're going to do in just a moment but with a face cut like this we can essentially go through and start from the outside and go inward and then we've got we've got a decent clean cut there we could also then this this pertains to the base of a bowl sometimes we get in the bottom of a bowl we can make a cut from the center and work our way out either of those cuts are fine and they make a they'll make a good passive here that doesn't rip out in grain fibers because again we're just kind of peeling away the top layer of this face now let's talk about what happens when we go through the grain at an angle like we do with the curves of the side of a bowl so my aha moment was when i was talking with a couple people and they explained to me well cutting with the grain is kind of like if you move a knife over a broom or if you go across your fingers and they held up their fingers and they showed if you have the bull gouge going this way it's grain supported but if you go this way it kind of pushes up those fingers it's unsupported green cut and that started to make sense and started a click the big important takeaway from this is for instance when you go across the fingers like this if you're going to cut across these this finger is shorter than that finger this longer grain underneath this shorter grain is supporting it and making the cut smooth so that's what was my big aha or my aha moment that i started really understanding what was going on the other one that's a great analogy is if you have a broom same concept you take a knife and you cut across the the fibers of the broom you're going to cut them away cleanly however if you go from the front of the broom into the into the fibers they're just going to get all frayed you can also think of a of a pig you think you ever had a chance to touch a long-haired pig that's got bristly hair the hair only lays down one way if you go the opposite way it goes back up that was all kind of getting close but it still wasn't 100 there i'm going to demonstrate a supportive cut and a unsupported cut using celery first of all i need to get some of these some of this out of the way you guys didn't know this is a cooking show too did you okay so if this is the curve of a bowl and we were to look at it through a microscope it's going to look a lot like this if you've got an outside curve bowl you're going to have in fibers they're not going to be cut so square like this but there you get the general idea this fibers are sticking out of one another now if we try to make a cut across this where the grains the length of the grains underneath are shorter than the grain i'm cutting on this is an unsupported cut this is not what you want to do and i'm hoping that we'll be able to see an example of why okay see this tearing that's kind of reminiscent of what's going to happen with an unsupported cut it's not as clean as it could be now if you take the same configuration of the side of a bowl using the celery as an example and we make a supported cut we have the the grain the length of the grain underneath the grain that's being cut is longer and that's the case here so this top grain is going to be cut this one's longer the next one underneath longer that grain these grains that are underneath the top one are supporting it now if i make the same cut look how clean and precise that was and see how even everything just laid down because those underlying layers supported the cut that is a grain supported cut i'm gonna have some celery you should bring snacks out in the shop more often okay so hopefully you're starting to get the point of the supported cut the supported grain cut and how important it is to explain it and understand it versus just saying downhill or with the grain here's a cutaway of a bowl and if you can imagine you can see the lines this is the grain moving through this bowl now if i'm on the exterior of this bowl and i'm cutting and i decide to go from the rim to the base of the bowl you can see where there's going to be problems especially right in here where you have these longer grains that have nothing underneath them to support them and they're going to start splintering off and leaving a lot of a lot of broken ingrain along the edge of your bowl likewise you can see the same thing here and if you were to if you were to go from the inside of the bowl up you can see how that's going to it's going to dig into these these fibers here luckily that's not so easy to do with a bowl when you turn a bowl and that's part of the reason why we do side grain bulbs more than in green bowls is that you basically are cutting from the rim down to the inside and that is a supported cut going from the rim to the to the base on the exterior starting from the rim going or starting from the base going up to the rim is a supported cut now i mentioned earlier you can also do in grain bowls this would be the equivalent of basically putting a log on the lathe a lot of people think of bulls when they first hear of turning the bulls they imagine that that's how it's done you just take a log and stick it on the end of the lathe and you put the tail stock in and spin it into a bowl well you can do that there's a there's some disadvantages to that one of those um if you do that the end grain is going to be running up to up and down one of the disadvantages is the turning the interior now the exterior on an ingrained bowl now again this is not the most common bowl and i don't turn these very often i do turn them but not that often but on an ingrained bowl you would want to start from the exterior from the rim and work down to the base and you can see why if you're starting from the base and worked up i'm going to dig in underneath these fibers and pop them out and break those those grains the trick with an end grain bowl is you have to turn it and cut it from the inside up to the rim and that's can be challenging this is especially if it's a narrower bolt link but essentially you can see how that's all supported the grain cuts are all supported going up here if you go down into an ingrained bowl you're going to go right down into those fibers and split them and crack them and cause all kinds of issues going down all right those were all supported cuts and as you can see on the end grain here how smooth that turned out as a matter of fact when i was doing the the end cut here perpendicular it really didn't cut that smooth however having those underlying longer grains underneath the layer that i was cutting supporting them this grain supported cut let the bowl gouge make a beautiful finish cut now another way that i learned how to make a proper supported grain cut was by doing it incorrectly so if i go from the rim towards the the base that is an unsupported green cut so the fibers i were cutting were longer than the underlying fibers and look how horrible that turned out that's the same ingrain right there that's it that's that is going against the grain now you can see that really clearly this is a very dry piece of pine that i'm using because i know this is going to demonstrate really well it's going to show you how dramatic an unsupported cut can look so if you're turning bowls and you're getting a finish that looks like this and you're thinking wow something's not right it could be that you're that you have the bull gouge cutting in the wrong direction and making an unsupported cut now let me make a supported cut to clean that up [Applause] look how nice that turned out now what you're seeing right there are the bottoms of the torn out areas from that unsupported cut i just made earlier what happens is when you tear out those ingrained fibers they go down below the surface during quite a ways and you have to cut away several layers of material before they're smoothed out again so let me make another pass with a supported cut now you can see they're starting to get better still a little bit rough but you'll be surprised that when you make an unsupported cut or if you get a catch or you have tear out that tear out can go very deep down in between those grains and you may have to remove as much as an eighth to a quarter of an inch of material before you get back down to fibers that haven't been torn out and have a smooth finish again that's something to keep in mind as well all right here's the trick question let's see if you you're getting this if you wanted to make a closed form bowl and that's basically any bowl that has a opening that is narrower than the widest part of the bowl in this case this is just a very subtle closed rimmed bowl and what would you use what direction you would you cut and again this is a side grained bull blank would you cut from the base up to the top or would you start at the top and go to the base that's the question the biggest thing you need to remember is there needs to be a longer grain underneath the grain that you're currently cutting that's that's the biggest takeaway and that makes it a supported grain cut this primarily pertains to the end grain fibers those end grains are what you're sticking out and how we're cutting them with the bowl patch as they come around is what's critical if we don't do it right they're going to tear out and as you saw that tear out can be very dramatic and it's going to force us to have to fuss with that surface and it's not something that stands out very easily because it could be it could be quarter inch deep you would have to stay on the entire bowl down a quarter of an inch which could take forever so you want to learn to make these cuts really smooth and clean with a nice supporting crane cut so the biggest takeaway is make sure those longer grains are underneath your shorter the grains being cut however these have something to do with the trick question here is if you think about that the length of these fibers if this was the side of a bowl and you had shorter fibers longer fibers shorter than shortest how would you make that cut that's kind of the same question we're talking about with a closed form fold how would you make that cut all right if you recall i said it was a trick question and it is a trick question because what you want to do is you want to keep in mind those supported grain fibers you want longer grains underneath the shorter grains you can see that this area is shorter than this area so you're going to make the first cut from the base up to the highest point or the apex of the exterior of the bowl then you're going to make your second cut from the rim up to that apex so there's two cuts to have grain supported cut you're going to basically come up to this high point right here from the bottom up and from the rim up so that's a trick question but as you can see those are all supported grain cuts as you make that progression up to the highest point of the bull okay i realize a lot of you guys already understand this but if you can think back to when you were first learning this this can be very confusing so i really wanted to go over this information and make it clear for people to understand a little bit better hopefully this video takes care of that if you do understand the concept of supported grain cuts then leave me a comment below and tell me what your aha moment was what was it that triggered you to finally understand and get it and for those of you that that are still struggling with this don't be discouraged just keep practicing if you can't figure it out then try a cut in both directions and you're going to see which one's smoother that's going to be your answer so then take that as your definite answer and and start placing the other the visuals that go along with that to start putting together an idea of which direction you want to be and again disregard the cut with the grain and the downhill statements because those are completely useless as far as i'm concerned i i want to be able to help you guys learn how to turn wood bolts and this is a critical step in turning wood bowls and getting it and don't worry once you do understand this supported green cut it kind of becomes natural and you know just by your approach to the lathe what your cut's going to be and you know that it's going to be supported so don't think this is super overwhelming you're going to you're going to figure it out and once you do it's it's not a big deal but it is important if you're struggling and you're trying to get a good finish on your bowls and you're getting tear out things that make sure there's a chance you might be making unsupported cuts i hope you like this video and if you did please click the like button and subscribe if you're not already and click that bell you'll click the bell you're going to be notified when my videos come out and i've got tons more to share with you guys and also leave me a comment if you do understand supported brain cuts leave me a comment let me know what your aha moment was how did you figure it out and what was the moment that you decided how to cut properly with full couch all right guys well thank you and until next time happy turning you

Channel: Turn A Wood Bowl

Views: 37,296

Rating: 4.9652476 out of 5

Keywords: bowl gouge which way to cut, bowl gouge cut direction, bowl gouge direction, supported grain cut, bowl gouge technique, bowl making, bowl turning, bowl turning techniques, woodturning techniques, wood turning bowl, push cut, wood bowl, side grain, bowl gouge basics, bowl gouge cuts, bowl gouge for beginners, wood turning basics beginners, bowl turning tools, wood turning bowl gouge, wood turning bowl tutorial, bowl gouge, wood turning, Woodturning

Id: WRC0NW4R7gA

Length: 21min 15sec (1275 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 29 2020