Lichtenberg Fractal Burned Vessel

what turning with Tim is made possible by these fine sponsors the American Beauty Tim uses was made by robust tools all our lace have a seven year warranty our tool wrist feature a hardened rod on top lots of sizes of the future lathe robust because of the making matters Thompson laid to 'ls welcome to a new level of professional wood turning tools made by a woodturner for wood Turner's you today at woodturning we're going to make a really cool project we're going to use this piece of hickory to make a beautiful Southwest shaped vessel but we're going to take it one step further we're going to do some cool stuff to it this is called Lichtenberg biography biography it's one of those words I hope I got that right but anyway we are literally going to shock the crap out of this piece of wood and burn all this beautiful detail in here when the process happens it's fire smoke it's really spectacular it is one of the coolest things around it also can kill you that's why we're going to go to a pro and we do this not do it ourselves but you gotta admit it is a beautiful looking piece of art once you get done with this and it looks like branches and little like a tree in the winter almost my wife said it look like Brussels sprouts that overgrown and come gone to seed but anyway it is a really cool add addition you can do to your wood now what we're going to do is we're going to take this big old chunk of Hickory and put it on the lathe and start rounding out our blank now we're going to take our blank of wood here and I'm going to take a two-prong Center to mount this because two prongs digs in deeper into green wood then four prong and that gives me a much better bite so take our mallet just whack that in there really good kind of holds itself once you get it where you want it so we're going to look I can't reach over here first there we go slide this in and then bring this up you can see already X the wood so I know pretty much where the center is that way it guarantees that I'll be spinning on Center and not waste a lot of wood when I'm roughing this out so this piece of wood was well you can tell you will understand why I show you this this is sitting this way in the tree so this is up and down so the grain is running this way so as opposed to a bowl blank we are doing a spindle turning so the grains run this way right now so we can use a roughing gouge to rough this out as opposed to having to use a bowl gouge so I'm going to turn this make sure it's not touching and we'll get our roughing gouge and rough this out so we're going to turn the lathe on as slowly as possible and bring up our speed something this big you want to take your time with and we're going to get a little shake and you can go past that shake and then it evens out so you can go a little faster than you think you can now one thing I've done that's important is this tool rest is hanging that way of the wood and this side of the tool rest is hanging that way the wood you don't want to have this lined up right on the edge because you'll be cutting along you'll drop off so it's really important that when you start your roughing here your on tool rest and you'll write your way all the way across and you still have to rest remaining so see nice and secure there so this will take a little bit of work to get rounded out but in a minute we're going to be making some great shavings now I would advise when you work what's up in this big you probably want to wear a face mask because you don't know if the wood is going to have any splints or checks in it and early on if something's going to go wrong that's when it's going to happen because if there's a split in the wood it might be weak and the piece of wood could break in half this piece of hickory that I got was from a friend and the tree had been down for several years and when he cut the wood I'm gonna stop this to move my to arrest closer when he cut the wood he didn't seal the ends so there were cracks in this wood already so I had to cut a lot of wood away on the bandsaw anyway see I've moved the tool rest closer now so my tool is not hanging over as much when you start hanging over a lot is when you get into trouble the more it hangs over the more leverage the wood has on you and you see this is looking pretty good and pretty solid and the reason I don't wear a face mask during the show very often is because it's really hard to hear me and also you can't see my pretty face now we're making fun shaving so we are rounded out and that looks pretty good I just want to check see if there's any checks or cracks in the wood and it's looking really nice this is beautiful wood it's almost a shame we're going to burn the crap out of it a little bit but that's going to be so much fun I want to grab my parting tool though because we need to make a tenon on this end because we're going to hold this in the Chuck and we're going to put this in probably the largest set of Chuck jaws I have so I'm going to part down like so and I have a pair of calipers already set for the proper diameter of my Chuck jaws and so they're pretty big you can tell of big is my head so anyway we'll get this in here I'm going to rest the tenon the tenon I'm going to rest the calipers on here oh my gosh I'm getting good I nailed it right off the bat let's just do one more cut and I'll show you how this works so come in and you kind of do this with one hand you ride the calipers on top of the wood there and you part down and then when the calipers go cross you've got your diameter right so now that I have my diameter right I'm going to clean this up just a little bit we're going to grab my favorite little special tool and that again is my tenon tool which has an angle on it now normally I cut from the other side but if you turn this around and tilt it down like so tilt the handle down you can go ahead and make the tenon on this side also I just want to bevel that in a little bit there we go now we got the perfect tenon and we're going to start shaping this to get our vase shape before we take this between centers now we're ready to make the shape of the vase and you can see it's very traditional and it starts high has a nice shoulder on it curves down all the way to the bottom the curve up here is about two-thirds of the way and then we have this lip up here which is about two-thirds of the width of the piece and then on the bottom it's about one-third the width you can also by the way you see this is cracked in a perfect world when I would turn this I would turn it green all the way down put it in a brown paper bag and then dry it for two or three months before we did anything to it but in this case I wanted to go ahead and get this done so we rushed it over to the guy we're going to meet in a little bit to have the pie ah grafite on here and same with this piece of wood it's probably going to crack - the best way to avoid cracking in addition to drying it in a bag is to make sure that you turn the walls equally thin all the way from top to bottom and I'll show you how we do that in a second with a hollowing tool so we can pick the speed up here a little bit and it's really going nicely we're going to start working on the top part here and start working in to make the neck and I'm using a half-inch shallowed detail spindle gouge a nice sharp when you can see how beautifully it cuts and I'm just setting the tool rocking my body back and then leaning forward into the cut and you just want to take this off a bit at a time it's like sneaking up on a bead to everything in wood turning basically is a bead so there's a lot of sneaking in wood dirty all I'm doing is working my way back to where I can establish the shoulder or basically I want to establish this shape right here so I'm just working my way back back back back I guess from that angle there I'm working my way back like this so I can make this shape right here and then that's going to determine where everything is so once I find out where that shape is on here then I can start making all the details so this is starting to look about right I want to take off some extra wood here there was a little bit of cracking in this blank although it's going to crack anyway because I won't have time to dry it but I'm going to come away from in just a bit to minimize that as much as I can nice long sweeping curve that looks good so my neck is going to be about there here's my shoulder so I can come back here now and start really roughing away the wood quickly look you got to keep the bevel in contact at all times if you dip your arm or something like that it pops off and it jumps off the wood and it'll bump into that edge that's called getting in a hurry and I should know better than anybody not to do that anyway you can see I'm just moving my body in one motion making this move and I only wanted some nice flowing sake so how do you get a flowing shape well you have to also flow with a shape another thing is is I'm not making any straight lines these are all subtle curves all the way through this so come here there we go now we're making the curve down you see how the shavings just fly off this tool because it's nice and sharp now if you start taking too much of a cut back up start the cut over and take less you can come back and re-establish them and finish the cut that way this is getting to be pretty good shape I'm going to mess with a little bit more and then we'll start working on the neck of the vessel okay you can see we have the shape just right so I'm going to work on the neck now and like I said I want to make the mouth the neck about 2/3 of the width of the widest part of the piece here so I'm just going to take my parting tool remove some excess wood let the tool ride the bevel on the wood and it cuts down I want to make the lip probably about a quarter of an inch just because I like that shape so we're coming in here like so I don't want to make this a really narrow mouth because we're not into showing off how to hollow right now we're going to just make a nice wide mouth shape and actually that's what is traditional with southwestern pottery is a wide mouth on the vessels so you can see I'm just sneaking in on the cut I'm going to blend in my shoulder right here I'm going to roll the tool like that and see I caught it at the very top tip right there I rolled it too much caught the wood and it bounced across so that probably gives us a little design modification probably stretch the wood a bit but what I want to do and what I meant to do is bring this in and turn it like so now it's flat now it's not cutting I want to come back and slice in here and make the undercut so there now I've made the first half of a bead by doing that and I can come over here now and roll the top of the bead now you can take the tool on inside like this and feather out the lip right here so that looks pretty nice what we're going to do is remove a little bit more wood here to make my life easier and I've got to show you one thing get it down here I'm going to sand this next and I'm not going to bother you with that because that's just boring but when you do a vessel like this if you sand it now it's a lot easier to sand it on the lathe and to sand it by hand after its dried but if Brian can show this easier I've left this pretty thick right here because I need all this structure and support when I Hollow because there's a lot of pressure back and forth in here if you draw your eye through here probably the bottom of the vessel is going to be about right here so we're not wasting as much wood as it looks like but by leaving this nice and thick here when we hollow we have all the support that we need okay there we've got it mounted in the Chuck with the big old jaws holding it really well you can just tell by the sound it's holding it beautifully so what we're going to do is hollow this out well the easiest way to do Halloween is to drill out the center first so I have a Forstner bit on an extender mandrel on a Jacob's Chuck so basically a drill bit holder and so the cool thing is when I hold this up here right here almost seems to be my perfect depth marker so that's how I'm going to know when I'm deep enough on this it's going to take a minute to drill out but it's going to be fun so we're going to slide this in and I'm going to slide it up to where it's just about touching turn that down going to bring my start and stop here turn it down lower because I don't want a high speed when I get this going so we'll start her up oops wrong button that's to stop you think I know buddy oh I'm standing on my emergency stop there we go oh it's been a long day already so I'm going to pick the speed up a little bit there we go we don't want to go too fast worth drilling because it can bind up with all the shavings that you get so this is an aggressive Forstner bit it has some saw teeth on it so I like it a lot for cutting and you can see how it just blows into there you can see all the little shavings that come off so itself ejects but after a while is going to stop self injecting and that means we're gonna have to stop see it's not injecting now we're gonna have to stop and clear out all the shavings and you're familiar with me I used to I used to leave the lathe running when I would do that and the noise was incredibly bad but so now I've learned to turn it off you can see we're coming back out look at the compression on all those shavings in there so there's a lot of wood in there that you're moving you need see steam coming off of it because it's building up heat so we'll take this we're going to slide our tail stock in now so we don't have to advance the quill over here anymore so you can see the quill is back so we have a lot of reach left now so we'll turn it back on and just start feeding it it in did it it in and what's the wood starts to come back to the edge we know we're packed again there we go we're gonna hit stop I want to slide this back and my extender came loose from my Forstner bit give me a minute and I'll get that worked out and then maybe we'll move on to the Halloween so how are we going to hollow this well there are a lot of Halloween systems out there but we are going to use probably what is the most compact dead simplest Halloween system on the market matter of fact it's like it so much I've been using it for so many years I'm not only a member I am now the owner of the company stand Townsend the guy who invented this thing made me a deal I could not refuse so guess what you won't want these give me a call but this is called the elbow tool and it's the original of the articulating arm hollowing systems and all you do is you put it here on your quill like so right so that's simple you unarticulated bring it to here and you just rock this till it feels flat and then back over here you just go clamp and it's on there now we want to cut with something so we need a tool right well this accepts all sizes of boring bars and it comes with its own boiler boring bar but you can put in the ones you already own with a chapters or three-quarter-inch like this and it fits right inside I need to find there it is I got my little allen wrench you just take this and simply slide it in one thing about when you're orienting this is down on this end make sure that you have this perfectly flat because if you're using a scraper you want to be flat you don't want it tilted back you can tilt it down a little bit for sheer cut but flat is the best and so it just takes two allen screws here just tighten it on and you don't tighten them very tight at all I was really amazed how well these hold so now what you do is you bring your tool rest like so let me back this off just a bit there we go and you see how the arm uncoils so it gives you a lot of flexibility flexibility ok I'm going to lower this until this point is dead center on the wood so the whole idea is you want to be cutting as close to Center as you can now I'm going to bring the two wrists closer so I have a little more support and if you notice it's odd things sitting on top this is a laser system it used to be you'd have to use calipers all the time to check your thickness all the way through well the cool thing is with the laser system you turn the laser on you got a red dot right well you position that red dot from the tip of the tool so now when this red dot falls off the edge of the wood I know I have that thickness of wall on the vessel so it's an easy easy way to hollow and dead simple so anyway let me start this up and I'll show you how it works we're going to turn this on about like so and again it's fingertip control and in hollowing you never want to hurry you just take your time you're moving the wood out a little bit at a time so we're going to bring the tip up here and see our touch and we'll get in a little bit deeper now you can see the laser hitting the wood right and you can see why drilling that hole in the center helps a lot because we're not working right on the center of the wood but look how beautifully that cuts I've got fingertip control I can do anything I want with it but the whole idea is you work yourself in a little bit at a time you make the wall thickness the thickness you want as you go back and keep working your way down you can come back later and use a round tip scraper and that will smooth out the inside for those views are really anal and what the insides are looks pretty too but I just go by teal I'm feeling the tip I drop off the edge I pull it across I go back I feel the tip I drop off the edge I pull it off and it's just a simple movement over and over and over and this is a high speed still bit and you simply just take it to your grinder and sharpen it like what you would a scraper so puts a little burr on there you lose the burr pretty quickly but this is sharp enough and hard enough that it cuts into this wood beautifully for quite a while so I maybe have to sharpen this one time during this whole process if that so go back in find that hole figure out where I am so I'm going to work my way in a little bit deeper and then we'll tell you how the laser pointer pays off a lot of savings in here I wanted to show you this you can see how that laser works really good you can see our wall thickness now we're getting pretty close to our one a beat matter of fact I'm just going to take a couple more passes and then all we have to do is part this off here and then we're going to have fun because we're going to take this and do some photography rock we're going to burn it now we're ready to meet the man who's going to turn this into this and that man is Morgan and Morgan we came to you because this is kind of a tricky thing to do in it yeah it's a little tricky it's a little dangerous and what do you call it exactly I call a Lichtenberg prog raphy but there's other terms for this right basically just Lichtenberg fractal burning okay because this winds up looking like fractals I guess yeah it's inside a sort of fractal so you do a lot of burning and I see some big pieces back here so what is all this about well these are pieces that we've been doing as customs basically we create an outline and a vectoring program then we put it on there and so you're able to draw with it I see the skull I mean that's pretty cool because I thought this is just random well the fractal like Franco by definition is actually random these are kind of a technique that we've learned to do outlines so you can actually kind of teach or tell the electricity where to go yeah no animator speaking in a matter speaker that's really cool so I mean these are big forms and stuff and you work with flat wood so was working with round wood a bit of a challenge um not particularly the live wood actually really helped with that because it has a little moisture in it yeah has a little bit of moisture and the saturation really helps that what I was impressed too because everything's distinct in this you did a really good job of spreading things out I've seen a couple of these where there's just a couple lines on this and others were so almost burned to death yeah and I really like the spacing you did on that what sort of thought goes into that well with that it's really just all about the saturation of the wood and how you hold the arcing utensil and that kind of allows you to get more control over the direction in which it's burning so who's the mad scientist this is William Cosette is your partner yeah he's my business partner and he does most of the resin working is tough for us okay now he would be talking but we're cheap we only have two mics so he's gonna be quiet the whole time yeah and the masks probably doesn't help yeah probably and you're doing some really cool stuff here you're also putting resin these are just test pieces of it yeah these are all just little test pieces we've done and some of the stuff glows in the dark and that's what he's mixing up over there is some resin but look at this you guys you even trying to get fiber optics into these oh yeah I mean that's incredible I mean with ours we're just going to burn it today but I like the extra stuff you can do to this yeah we've really been thinking about some of the possibilities as far as manipulating their designs so when you mix the resin up you got to get the right dosage right yeah but also how do you keep this stuff from running out of the channels well it takes a lot of squeegee work yeah and you also put foil or like this is looking at this and where is it you do what is that adhesive aluminum like used for duct work yeah exactly so you put that on the edges so won't run out yeah this little open parts on the edges we just kind of keep that in there and so it's easier to smooth out and we can make it perfectly even so it's not a tedious process but it takes a little time right oh it takes quite a lot of time oh it's so he pours it in there and then he just levels it off and is that it well after that we just kind of have to keep leveling it off today it takes quite a little bit of time but one thing we also do is use the blowtorch and that eliminates all the bubbles so you're working with electricity and fire I like this this is a pretty cool place how it's fun so how do you do the blowtorch is what does I do it takes the bubbles that you said yeah it kind of breaks the surface tension and allows the bubbles to move freely so this is where you do the fun stuff at but the fun stuff we got to make sure we tell people that is dangerous right yeah it's we're using 15,000 volts here so we got we got a lot of a lot of possibility to hurt yourself we've made sure to put a couple safety precautions in place like safety goggles and rubber gloves to help help keep the electricity from hitting you we got rubber mats here and rubber mats on the floor and fire extinguisher so you're ready in case something happens oh yeah so in reality if you do this wrong you you and you're by yourself you could kill yourself hypothetical yeah yeah exactly possible but you always have your partner here somebody's here with you whatever I do this so you have helped to make unplug it the other thing is is now with the SIP you have you can still get a shock right yes but with the rubber gloves and not being grounded and we can basically eliminate that so you got to know your high school electricity rules well what do you do now how you get this going you have to soak it with water right yeah the first thing we do is we soak it with a mixture of sodium bicarbonate which is just baking soda and water and a certain amount of saturation and then basically that's about it we're good to go okay let's see it happen so you have to have both probes touching for its start burning right yes okay and then wow that's really cool so it just slowly crawls across yeah you have any idea why it picks the directions it picks well it has to do with the level of saturation in any given direction because electricity always wants to go toward the the path of least resistance so does it follow the grain of the wood sometimes or yeah it also does that because um you know the different sections through the wood saturate the sodium bicarbonate differently which you know makes it favor one spot because that's again the path least resistance did you have to modify your approach as far as the Holly how you hold the tools when it came to the round objects I'm not particularly actually it's really interesting it's like it's a little light show in there you can see the red glow inside so that's obviously really hot now we added a little sparkles it's just mesmerizing to watch yeah it's quite fun so how long would it take you to do this vessel how long take you to the last um this one right here would probably take me about 30 minutes to I already been pletely finished so this looks a little bit different than the one we have here but it turns out different every time right yeah each each fractal pattern is extremely unique okay and even though it looks really dark and black there you do a scrubbing process to clean off the carbon yeah little bit of a finishing process to kind of reveal the true shapes of the arcs and then it starts looking like this and you guys finish with what what do you put on your wood usually a wood stain or a pike a polyurethane and that pops out the grain of the wood and makes it look really good yeah okay well I appreciate you having us over here Morgan it was really cool and so until the next time on wood turning keep turning and keep burning the American Beauty Tim uses was made by robust tools all our lays have a seven-year warranty our tool wrist feature a hardened rod on top lots of sizes of the future lathe robust because of the making matters Thompson laid to 'ls welcome to a new level of professional wood turning tools made by a wood turner for wood Turner's

Channel: Woodturning with Tim Yoder

Views: 972,952

Rating: 4.829155 out of 5

Keywords: Woodturning with Tim yoder, Woodturning Workshop, Tim Yoder, PBS, woodworking, popular woodworking magazine, Arc work, wood, hobby

Id: b__z2apE7dA

Length: 28min 5sec (1685 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 31 2016