Facework: Cutting End Grain

you hey folks Brian havens here at the lathe you know in woodturning we're turning face work we spend a lot of time cutting and grain in fact if making bowls is your thing you're probably spend about 80% of your cuts are actually cutting end grain and it's really important to be able to cut to know how to cut end grain correctly because not only is an issue of quality it can be a serious safety issue now what often happens with new wood Turner's most wood Turner's first learn how to turn in spittle turning and they'll start out by roughing out a square buying into a cylinder with this tool a spindle roughing gouge and what usually sometimes happens is that Turner without the proper teaching instructor or mentor they get eager and they want to start to do some face work so they take what they know from spindle turning word they were using the route the roughing gouge placing on the tool rest rubbing the bevel and raising it until it starts cutting which is perfectly fine and spin the work and then they take that they try to apply that to face work and that's where things can go downhill really really quickly now and I've seen several videos on YouTube talking about all the things that can go wrong when you try to use a spindle roughing gouge on face work and they're all correct about what happens but there's a more fundamental issue going on here which is that we never want to cut directly into end grain so the grain on this face work imagine that straw is one single fiber in the wood so the grain is running this way through the wood so we have end grain most about ninety percent of this outside of this cylinder is end grain and if I had a horizontal cutting edge I'm now going directly into end grain and in fact not only would you not want to do this with a roughing gouge you wouldn't want to do it with any - with a horizontal edge not a parting tool not a spindle gouge and not even a bowl gouge you wouldn't want to use a bowl gouge this way either because we're going directly into and great now so what is the problem with cutting directly into endgrain and to understand that we kind of have to understand all the different three ways that you can cut three grain orientations that you can cut wood with so I have my sample blank locked into my spindle here so I can demonstrate cutting different kinds of grain orientation so right now my grain is running this way through the wood and you can imagine that straw again being a single fiber of wood now what the first way to cut in the way that flat woodworkers like to cut is always with the grain now if I take my my spindle gouge here and I simply just by hand try to cut into the wood you can see as soon as that cutting edge engages the wood something has to yield now when you're cutting long grain since it's so soft and there's a little resistance the wood is always going to going to go to yield now if I rotate this what happens if I wrote this to this 90 degrees and I do the same thing now I'm going across the fibers so my wood fiber is like that in the wood and again if I take my gouge and just run it across there there's a little bit more resistance than there was for the long grain but it's still fairly low so the wood is always going to yield to the cutting edge especially if you have a sharp cutting edge now what happens there's my grain again what happens if I start to cut on the very end of the grain right there well you can try this as well in your shop if I take this gouge and start to cut into end grain you'll find the resistance is much higher I have to really push into the wood to go discern not it can actually get worse because if I start to cut or this into the ends of the fibers more it's you lengthwise this the fiber a lot more strength and resistance so if I start to try to cut into here it gets even higher resistance it's almost impossible really difficult to cut through that wood so that becomes a problem if we're trying to cut directly into end grain we if the cutting edge is going to see this really really high resistance now if you happen to get a catch and there something's going to give hopefully the wood will give but that's not always what happens so what kind of ugly things can happen if you get a catch while while cutting directly into a Jenn grain well one thing that could happen if you had it on if you had your work on a tenon the tenon could break free and now you've got depending on how fast you're spinning your work you might have this airborne chunk of wood flying through your shop and although that's probably not the worst thing that could happen that's the it's it's not a good thing and it only gets worse from here now if you happen to get a catch right about there where I'm lining up with the ends of the where the bevel is lining up with the ends of the of the work this tool could actually start to act like a wedge and actually separate a big chunk of this work and now you've got a piece of you've got a chunk of wood with the sharp edge edges flying through your shop and as well now you've got the rest of this blank that just became significant balanced and if you've done any kind of work with unbalanced work pieces you know that even a small amount of imbalance can make a 300 pound relieve and dance across your shop and that wouldn't be good either now what happens if the wood doesn't yield well something's going to yield and and a lot of times what happens is you'll get a catch and the the enormous amount of energy being transferred tool will rip the tool right out of your hand and make it to either send the tool flying across your shop or sometimes it will actually draw your other hand into the work and you can damage your thing badly that way in fact one the one of the videos on YouTube he actually went ahead and was doing cuts with a the spin the roughing gouge and that's exactly what happened that the tool got pulled into the work at his hand his finger got pulled in with it and he injured his finger now there is if you don't heed the warnings and you go ahead and still do this and you do it with a spindle roughing gouge there's something even worse that can happen because even though this tool looks like a hefty tool look it right here that's called the Tang it's not as apparent on this one you can see on this one that the tool thins out quite a bit right there and this part of the tool is not meant to withstand that kind of energy that happens when you get a catch and end grain and it's been known to actually snap now you've got this piece of tool a piece of tool handle no the toilet excuse me the tool itself flying across this shop and you've not only got that sharp edge you've got that jagged edge where the Tang just broke off and that's not a good thing now if we can't cut into end grain directly how are we going to go about cutting and grain well it's kind of like in a Bruce Lee Bruce Lee movie where he says the art of fighting without fighting well this is going to be the art of cutting end grain without cutting end grain now I thought of a it's what we actually want to do instead of cutting directly to end grain these you want to cut across end grain now it's really hard to sort of explain what that is but it's really easy to illustrate with a simple utility knife now I've put a brand new blade in here so there's no question about sharpness and and if I was to cut directly in in grain it's like taking my utility knife and trying to cut across these fibers you can see it's very hard you'll probably end up breaking you're probably into breaking the blade before you make any progress but what if instead of cutting directly into the end grain we could do two things first we have the fibers running this way what if I can cut across the fiber like this and then now I've got this little bit of fiber still hanging on right there what if I could just peel it off about like this now that seemed to work we didn't cut with cutting and grain but we haven't cut directly into ingredient it said we're slicing the fibers and then peeling away the waste now what if there was a tool that you've probably already have in your arsenal that will actually make both those cuts at the same time well there is it's called a gouge and especially a bowl gouge this Pacifica's are especially good that that's why they're called bowl gouges now so what I want to do instead of approaching my work like this I want to come in from the side and I'm going to use that tip of the gouge the very tip is going to slice the end grain fibers across the fibers just like I did with utility knife this way and then as the cut proceeds the wing on the bottom is going to be like peeling away the waste with utility knife that isn't that cool you can do both cuts with a single tool um now to do this cut you want to make sure you're always you never want to engage up the idea the upper wing because now you're starting to cut directly into end grain again you always want to cut with the tip to slice the fibers and peel away with the bottom wing now usually when we want to enter a hard entry like this we want to make sure that tip comes in first so when I first start out my bowl gouge is going to be completely on its side like that you can see the bottom wing is actually going downhill just a little bit that's just enough that I can get the tool into the work and establish a bevel once I've got that bevel I'm going to rotate the tool so that my lower wing is about horizontal that's my optimum that's a pretty good position for peeling away the waste now as the cup proceeds you can leave it at horizontal but if you turn it up just a little bit you'll get a little bit more speed out of the cut you can use that twisting to control how fast you're going through the cut and it looks about like this so I have my couch completely on its side I've made entry now I've got a little bit of a Ledge I can open up my dog and you can see that kit wiping away the endgrain fibers and the wing is peeling away the way now I open up a little bit more we go a little bit faster close it down and down and as I get to the end of the work slow down that way I don't come blowing out the end of the work two pictures and that is the property you can see just how clean those fibers work up not as the way we cut across endgrain right so now we've done we've done that we've cut across the endgrain completely perpendicular parallel to the lathe bread but perpendicular to the fibers what happens when we start cutting let's say at about 45 degrees how do we make that cut well you're still cutting significantly against you're still cutting significantly against the fibers across the fibers so we still have to treat that as n green so I've got a camera here so it's the same thing enter open up to my lower wing is horizontal down so I have a knife stop bending and you can see even as we look at that 45-degree it still looks significantly like let's get a picture here so we can see for the video so you can see that fibers still look like anyway that means when we're cutting at about a 45 we still have to treat it like angry well what happens if we go a little bit further what happens to be say about 22 and a half degrees put that 45 in half now you can see it's actually starting to look a little bit more like side grain sort of halfway in between so that's about I would say this is around no man's line we could treat this as n grain or side grain but anything steeper than this we have to retreat the whole thing as n grain so typically on the outside of the bowl except for the bottom you're treating the whole bowl as side grain rice would be as n gray and there you go that's the way we cut across endgrain I think if you try this cut out this whole idea of cutting across to ingrain you'll find that you'll get a much cleaner surface and as well this kind of when you cut this way it's oh it's really difficult to get I've never gotten a catch using this cut before it's a very tame cut because we're not no longer cutting directly in hit a high resistance end grain we're cutting across the Sai greens the equivalent of cutting into side grain which is much less resistance so there you go so until next time i'm brian havens thanks for watching you

Channel: Brian Havens

Views: 116,341

Rating: 4.9238439 out of 5

Keywords: Cutting End Grain, woodturning, facework, bowl, end-grain, bowl gouge, Wood Grain, technique

Id: N2Onfm2CXHo

Length: 16min 29sec (989 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 28 2015