Make and Sell Wood Spin Tops

[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so if you haven't figured out already today's video is going to be about top making and specifically making tops for art and farmer's markets so not only am I going to talk to you about a lot of the tips and techniques I have actually how to make the stuff I'm gonna show you some ideas for doing it live in front of a crowd or using demonstrations like this to draw people into your booth to help you sell stuff and you know I don't know if it's embarrassing or just odd or in kind of weird but you know with all my you work on YouTube all my writing for magazines all the furniture pieces I've put out there all the art pieces I've sold I'm both known as the top guy cuz I don't get recognized for any of that other stuff out there but I could be in the middle of a grocery store and some little kid will come up to me and say you're the tough guy you're the top guy you got any tops or I've literally been getting my haircut yeah I used to get my haircut and telling people that you know I'm a woodworker right so art murki stuff and they'll start telling me this grace story about this guy those doing live demonstrations and he made their daughter a top I mean this stuff you can't make this stuff up people will be random stores say hey I know you were you that guy on Congress Street six years ago that made me a top look yeah so I'm gonna show you the kind of tricks that I've been using over the years that's got me this is that reputation out there and hey if they know me as a top guy they see me at art market maybe they'll buy some of the more expensive stuff besides these cheap low tops [Music] [Music] now in order to make tops wait I'm gonna show you today you're gonna need a few things including a lei now you don't need a full-size laid back probably eighty ninety percent of all the tops I make are on a little jet mini lay but if you can get one with a variable speed it'll make things a lot more efficient and when you're doing live demonstrations it's nice not having to swap out the gears but every now and then I do show people gear so that they can understand how things work especially if it a little kid wondering what your lathe is bring them around shut up it's a it's kind of a relationship builder next up you're going to need basically three types of gouges you're gonna need a standard spindle roughing gouge I prefer a 3/8 inch spindle gouge with a fingernail grind to it and the specific angles you can do what you will but I also take away a lot of the heels so I can turn a tight corner and I should you'll see that more in a second and then I kind of like to have a few available because I find it makes that one little cut to separate the top from the blank a lot easier but you can do that one with a spindle gouge and that's it as far as your couches now if I'm doing a long all-day event I will sharpen up my tools right before I leave and then I will be honing them all day long with my little diamond slipstone it's a 600 grit and that's all I take out to the meet to sharpen you also will need a jaw a Chuck for your lathe and I kind of for this application prefer the one way with a little whammy bar style grippers I just find it's really efficient to work that way now the last thing it's nice to have just a little sliver of sandpaper you're not going to be sanding this products in very much at all but sometimes the edge you create are so sharp that you might worry a kid could cut himself so to blunt some of the edges it's nice to use sandpaper for the material I really do like hard maple reason wise you can pick it out with very straight grain so that that very thin spindle on the top you can make very thin and they'll stay strong it's hard enough to take years of abuse of kids dropping them and spinning him it's a closed poor grain so you can get really tight tighter stuff open pores they get kind of stringy and they break a little bit easier and it's a very uniform and cream color so the markers take to it very very well and don't go for soft maple go for the hardest stuff the harder the better because you can get a really nice polish straight up the blade with a hard stuff and that's about it oh and you'll need sharpies and if you can get the brighter color ones those bright Pink's are going to be some of your favorite colors alive greens that are going to be great the teals are gonna be common the brighter colors seem to be what the kids gravitate towards and you can get a 12-pack but occasionally during see every seasonal stay or something like that place is like a office depots and those office stores they'll have a sale where you can pick up twenty four for the price of six or something like that so whenever I see those or did you Jenna grab a couple kids one of these packages will last me most of the year it's not using that much more likely the kids have gone press too hard and burn them up and reduce the edge but it's not that big a deal get yourself some sharpies and get the name-brand don't skip on that you're not saving much and there is a difference now concerning them lumber I go get six quarter roughstock from my local hardwood dealer and once again I'll pick the pieces that have the tightest straightest grain all the way down you want the boring stuff for this kind of work and if it's actually six quarter that's not that big a deal six quarter to eight quarter are the ones I use the most eight quarter are the ones that a lot of times I will sell make to sell in toy stores because they're just a tad bit bigger and they bring a premium there now whenever I'm measuring these I mean I cut them up into blanks that are roughly five and a half inches because I can put that in the Chuck and all that is left when I'm done is about a half inch of material and this is just waste or you can give it a kit and give it to a kid as a joke now to get the perfect square I will take it over to my table saw and I lay the board on the side and get the fence over it so that butts up between the fence and the blade that way when I rotate it around I can cut a perfect square now you can do the same thing on a bandsaw if you're if you don't have a table saw and or you just don't like doing that but when you work on the table saw I do recommend that you cut the board's cross cut them at links where you would be getting about four or five of these out because it's easier to handle and I found that sometimes rough stock is still a little bit green and as you're feeding it through it'll kind of warp or release tensions as you cuts so the short of the board's within reason it feels safer for me to working on the table saw but then again I'm kind of scared of the table saw so after you do that one either use a crosscut sliding fence or your chop saw to get a perfect 90 degrees so that one of the sides is a perfect reference you're going to need that one because when you load it up basically you push it all the way forward so it seeps at the bottom of your jaws really tightly that makes it perfectly square then tighten them up once again the reason why I like these wainy bars is because it's fairly quick and consistent and there we go it'll be perfectly parallel and if you want check it just reference your tool rest notice I have not moved this to rest once it's set it's set for the entire day so let's make some tops [Music] [Music] now the first thing you're gonna want to do is get around out of your square blocks the thing is you have a couple of different purposes here when you're doing it for a live demonstration hey you want the fanfare you want shavings to be flying you want people to draw their attention in to come in here the other aspect is noise I like to make a little bit of noise because it seems like each time you chuck up a new thing it's kind of like a break and the crowd will move on and a new crowd will come in so you want to get as big a small crowd as possible around you you know it's gonna be five to ten people watching you and then they'll move on and that's kind of one of the things I like about this is because you can do it in you know three or four minutes entertaining people make you know however my top two sell to that group and move on to the next group now you can spin a non round item as fast as you want as long as it is balanced and that's it keeping why we had to get square stock and you had to put in 90 degrees on the end because by shoving it in there I got this sticking out very straight so whenever I spin it it is balanced now I keep them at five and a half inches because that gives me enough room to make three tops I have found that once I get to that fourth top lengthwise I can't quite work his dip hard over here it's a physic to action because you're so far from there there's a little bit more torque involved and I can't go as quickly so I keep it down to this size to make it safer I don't have to have a tail stock at this level because I'm not taking very heavy shavings uptaking fast shavings but not heavy shavings and it just seems to pace the show well so we've got set up I come over turn it on there we go see it is balanced now if it was Unbounce when you hand spun it you can either receipt it or just turn it a little bit slower and keep going by having this tail stock locked here where I never move it it's kind of my test for how unbalanced can it be because if it starts touching this one I just need to reseed it so turn it up now here's the thing you want to make some noise so you want to make a show so typical one by myself I'll stay here they are very short quick and they aren't getting much work done but they're making a loud sound and then what's point what's that basically that's done is knocked off all the corners not much else I didn't get much work done it's these long smooth cuts that gets the work done and I'll put my hand in front to block the shavings but my palm is actually resting on the torus so that palm touching the torus and the tool gives me my blood my dead stop you'll be able to tell when it's smooth if you want to you can put your tool rest on top it kind of shows a crowd what's happening and then take one last pass just getting really nice and smooth and to show off the thin shavings coming off plus the fact I've got my finger on my tool rest so now it looks nice and straight and the crowd will notice that that's kind of a nice little flare before you start if you end up with a nice straight shape if you already have a crowd around you generally it's probably gonna be little kids and stuff right because they kind of come in packs well one kid just a few seconds ago was standing right here coloring a top or decorating the top and you've got to get them to step back a little bit because you're going to be throwing shavings around a little bit and just to make the entire environment feel safe because the parents are watching everything and it is safety if anything happens if it breaks or something like that it's gonna come back this way not that way so it's all okay but you're going to be throwing shavings back so instead just saying okay everyone stand back well let me throwing cheney's now that comes imparts a sense of danger and we don't want that especially if you want to get people into the crafts so what a lot of times I'll do is I'll just look at the kids they have you ever seen it snow in Texas well probably most of them are going to say no cuz it's just of the snow here well I'll go OK stay back we're gonna make you snow and that gives it a gelato the theatrics to the hole just get back okay and then the parents will get them getting in on the joke and they'll have they come back they'll escort them back a little bit to keep them and monitor them and that's one key thing if you've got kids here the kids didn't get to the market by themselves they got a parent around so make sure that the parent is part of the presentation besides the parent has the money now if you're up north you can't really use uh snow technique so maybe you can do something like hey have you ever seen fibrous snow or high-fiber snow and go on from there okay stand back we're gonna make it snow so look with it I want you pay attention to my backhand so when you doing a normal cut you would actually hold the the to rest under hand with your thumb on top and then you just move your body back and forth we would find the cutting edge okay well this were in front of a crowd so what I'm doing I think I owed you a little bit first I'm putting my palm on the tour ups and no in the normal position it's your finger that's the depth stop it kind of holds it in so it doesn't gives you cut better control this time it's gonna be my palm and my hand on top my thumb is gonna press down to keep down the two arrests and my hand is gonna block the shavings and I kind of spread them out and angle my fingers because it kind of keeps the shavings going just right down there now at this point I'm you know I'm gonna tell you to do something that you really shouldn't do okay stop watching your work now I've got I've been doing this long enough that I know it's I'm not going in very far I can go boom boom boom boom oh it's just come in my hand right here it's just a little movement I'm not doing much so I can actually look it up and I can start interacting with a crowd right here not paying attention to the wood it's all off into my body everything it's a minor movement that you can gain control of I feel at this point time you wonder read your crowd because kids they're interested in it but a lot of times the adults right now if they're really focused in you can actually turn on saying have you done any woodworking before I always worth it woodworking because if I say have you done any turning before a lot of people haven't but they've got a lot of experience in woodworking in the heaven they understand the concept if you say woodworking they might go back to shop class and you can draw a little information out of them get the conversation going if they say no I can I can start talking to them and say hey I kind of didn't good hurting unlike slat work making tables and stuff like that and I can't working for the AVD crushes you pretty much have instant gratification and pretty much everything you need us know to turn would you learned on the elementary school now at this point you get to start and talking to the kids and the adults at the same time shift your information to the kids and start talking about science we're going to talk to start talking about fulcrums and stuff I've got the simplest tool we use in my hand and I am not quite finished making it completely round I got a few flats on here so I can take that opportunity of those last cuts to introduce people to the craft to show them the intricacies of what you're doing and to prove to them why all those high prices you have and all the stuff behind you is justified so if you have a kid right there hey you ever ride a seesaw or did the lawyers get rid of them before you had a chance to oh you did cool ok remember on the seesaw you're sitting on the seesaw you got the pivot point in the middle one kid goes up ten feet one kid goes down two feet right you know what that pivot point is called it starts with an ass-full fulcrum that's right okay now what would happen if we move that fulcrum point half the distance over all of a sudden that kid on the sub one side still goes up and down ten feet but the kid over here he went goes up and down five feet you cut the distance in half he goes up and down half if I cut it in half again all sudden he's going up two and a half feet cut it in again it's one and a quarter and half and half and it's what they call exponential as you go down now what would happen if you move that fulcrum point all the way to this bevel right here and let them see the tool see this see I have a sole bevel going around now if I could pivot off of that one point I can move the back of the handle a whole bunch and the cutting edge will barely move and that's a secret to tell us whether they call spindle turning is something called riding the bevel it allows the clumsy ox like me to get really fine detail work now I want you to listen because when I'm turning I'm gonna come over here I'm going to touch a ton of to rest not touch it to the wood and the bevel will actually stay on the wood and I can pivot off of that bevel and you can hear it every single time I come over I turn my lathe on touch it to rest hear it but there's no shavings coming off the bevel is on the wood and as long as I hit it off with that all of a sudden I can see shavings coming off so now that couldn't know the cutting edge is engaged so I just walked by this thing in my rock-hard ABS no laughing well I'll get my rock are damp and just move my body so that's how we can get a lot of control so that's what they call leverage and leverage can be either give you power like if you're jacking up a car or it can give you control like reducing the movement of that cutting edge okay so you just introduced a science lesson and you explain it in the manner that the parents all of a sudden say hey I might be able to do this touch it to the wood lift up move it across you could then transition does shaping the thing pick up your next tool a spindle gouge and point out the same bevel to them and then talk about the only difference is a spindle gouge is the artistic tool of the wood turning world and we use this to make beads and coves Abby just touch the bevel down you touch the wood over and you miss up on the back of a handle ye shifting around if you want to make a Cove you start up high and you go down low exactly opposite so you can actually give them a very nice lesson a added benefit to them patronizing here now why is that important because if they buy that three dollar tip then that three dollar top three or four dollar top and they give you a five dollar bill changes are they'll tell you they keep the change it's all about the money now at any point during the demonstration if the kids or people are coming up a little bit too close an easy way to stop the entire presentation without just making it look like you're stopping because you're worried for safety reason just turn it on turn your legs off come over pick up some shavings and start talking about to the kids and you can say hey you know what kind of wood this is this is sugar maple it's hard maple you like maple syrup well you know where maple maple syrup comes from right trees exactly this is the treat your syrup comes from you want taste see if it tastes like syrup it's high-fiber no oh you're pretty smart and then you kind of throw it out there and they'll back off okay but it gives you a chance to stop everything brace it without it appearing that you're stopping everything and everyone gets a little bit laughs thank you go okay back up again we're gonna get going again and they'll all back up [Music] [Music] so let's start talking about the cone of the top now if this is if you're just getting into turning a top is one of the best projects you can do to learn your spindle turning skills because it would really drive home the idea of double direction now here's my fingernail gouging it look they call it fingernail gouge because the shape isn't that of your fingernail coming up and around and it has a bevel coming all the way around but if you notice on the back of mine see how close we canwe that's as far as I can zoom in the actual bevel that I'm working on is way up here okay I have one bevel that comes all the way around and that sets the angle of my entire gauge can we see that in the camera there we go see that that's the angle you see the angle coming back and down if I move it forward a little bit this whole back section is just me removing metal so that's nice and round so I have a shorter bevel now if I were to just grind it all in one plane then the bevel would be ending up way back here and I can't pivot around the interior corners as much when I'm doing the handle that's why I like that short bevel it allows me a short pivot for con vexxt corners but that is the angle we are working with and the idea with a spindle gouge is that you are going to cut let me see if I can get there we go that you're going to cut on the direction you're going so if I'm going this direction I'm going to cut on this half of the gouge I don't ever tell you want to touch the top wing because I'll give me a catch if I'm coming this direction I want cut on that half of the gouge and generally you have two different ways of doing it you can either go point the tool in the direction you're going or you can drag the tool dragging is really uncommon but I'm going to show you why it's advantageous when we start working on the handle so right now what I want to do is gently when you're entering in the wood my bevel is pointing in the direction I want to go even though my tool is perpendicular to my tool rest so most people will tell you to start with it in the somewhat closed position where the flutes are right about perpendicular with the ground whereas completely flat is open so you kind of start out with close and then you open it up to get the cut and we're all going to do right now is remove that one corner when we cut this so I turn the lathe on if I'm on my jet I've got a wife all open at this point because the jet when it goes to about 2,000 rpms this one goes to about 3,600 and I'm I think I'm right at 3,000 right now so what I'm doing what when I teach people to do it I tell them to get it completely closed and then open it just a little bit put your thumb behind it and kind of on top and then you're just going to take the corner real slow and you're pointing in the direction of that bevel going do it again so this time won't back you engage it you can open this up a little bit then the next time don't close anymore and then you can just reenter it in again and again and you can continue to open this up and once you find the angle you want you'll notice that I can't as long as I'm pushing forward now it's get it back because I was too far open and I didn't have enough back pressure so you can enter open go through cancer open you want to engage the wood a little bit notice my handle comes around through it and come through it but by just pushing forward and not change this back handle angle you'll get a very nice straight now at this point time if there's any way that's express some interest in the crowd in woodworking or you've got a kid that's really enthralled with the idea of woodworking you can stop and turn to the kid and say have you ever done any woodworking no not even sanding oh you have sanded before isn't it boring now have you seen me pick up any sandpaper yet no come here feel this then you can invite the pass come over a few it and it's actually glass smooth you can actually see the reflection of the tool in the tool rest but if you aren't glass smooth I'm going to show you another trick one of the other reasons why I round over the back is I can actually use the back of the gouge as a burnisher so what's going to happen is I'm going to start cutting it and then I'm going to press after I get going I'm going to press into the wood a little bit to increase the friction and that friction is going to really crush those fibers and make it ultra smooth so right now you can barely see the tools reflection in the wood let's see if we can get it so you can see it crystal clear turn the speed up I get the tool going through the cut and right about now of the pressure this way you see that tool and again so now all of a sudden you can see the tool in the wood it's reflecting the light I'm hoping you can see that in the camera and that is really glass smoothing you can let them feel it that's when you have somebody interesting wood working you can continue the conversation about slicing fibers versus upgrading them blades versus sandpaper have you ever figured out why the old days that could build a table in a just a day but it takes us a week we sand all the parts where they would just grab one of those old-timey hand planes you've seen out there and a few slices and they've severed all the fibers instead of the braiding it that's why a lot of times today we miss the wood with water or some kind of filter and then sand between layers of finish because the braided fibers pick up the moisture and they swell kind of like carpet whenever it gets water on it it swells up and we got a retake off those little tops whereas if you braid it you're not gonna get that situation and you can go on and on and on it's just a matter of getting the conversation going and move on from there but just the fact that you let the kids touch it before the color you're gonna see a lot of just eyes light up and once again that is a time where it's not that you are building the value in the top if you are now building the value in that work behind you okay now on a second once a lot of times you have leftover remnants and I just use those for the shape so once again I'm going to start at the tip and I've got it slightly open and just go follow my bevel line and just add the tip now here's the thing tips are kind of finicky a really fine tip like I have right here and you always see me feel it it's very very sharp that will spin the best spin the longest but it's not very durable and if you spin it on a wood ball or something like that it will actually dent the bowl very easily so a lot of times I like to do them a little bit blunter we're at a lower angle but still fairly sharp that's a lot more durable so I feel it yeah I could still feel point but the angle is a lot less so it's more durable another thing you can do is think about rounding it a little bit so it's it's not a dead point and that was spin very stable II just not quite as long you want to say not quite as long it might spend for a minute wear one with a very steep point we'll spend for a minute and ten seconds so it's not that big a deal and after I get that point I can do different shapes I can come in directly maybe scoop it out I can come off the edges but it allows every single one to be slightly different another thing you can do if you are not getting the dead smooth surfaces they reflect your tool well you can also scrape them I can use this bottom wing when I rotate it over like that once I get that wing so it's less than 90 degrees this face if I just slightly touch the wood at less than 90 degrees that is actually a scraping cut and I can come in here and just scrape a little shading and scraping will give you that nice smooth surface hey just like that now if you have one of your toughs where the face is fairly flat like that you have an opportunity to do another science lesson with the kids and it works out really well if you have somebody in you know the sixth to ninth grade level you can ask them hey are y'all studying biology yet y'all start studying cells well what's the cell look like and a lot of times they'll talk about oh it's a nice round circle you know that get the nucleus all that kind of stuff Anita have you ever seen one with your naked eye did you know you could see trees are one of the simplest organisms on earth they actually predate grass grasses newer than trees and the tree cells are unlike the ones in our body what you're just like in your textbook nice round circles and bubbly looking because our bodies are mainly water what tree is mainly fiber so it's cells grow like long straws coming over and what would happen if you cut just a slice of a straw off what do you have a little circle with a little plastic on the outside like a piece of calamari well watch this and then you can come over and use that scraping cut as long as you're severing the fibers exactly sideways you can actually see little holes and those are some of the cells of the tree that move water up and down now if it's really windy this isn't going to work but I have a little almost a flat right there so I'm gonna use this wing of my tool to scrape into its flat and then I'm going to get these long thin shavings that come off and I'm gonna try to catch them in my hand it's kind of hard to do on windy days outside so here we go I come over get spinning nice I engage it the wing below 90 degrees so it's a negative angle I come over there we go now look at those cells can you see the holes in them you show it to the kids can you see the little holes now go yeah because I mean you can literally see the holes in between them what you're looking at is just a bunch of calamari that are kind of stuck together side by side there's not much holding them together so you want to see a magic trick put them in your palm okay here we go if you put one hand on top of it and just rotate your hand guess what happens you're separating all those slow cells there's not much holding it together and it's gone and all you have is this little fine powdery dust magic trick you made it disappear so yeah you've got a little science lesson in there and why is that important well you have parents are sitting over there watching you remember me telling you hey keep the change chances are you go up every time you add value to the presentation so let's make some more tops okay now we're gonna start working on handles but I want to review something with you really quickly when we were doing the tip the cone there is no wood on this side so once you sever the fibers on this side the wood has a place to go watch well when you're working with there's gonna be wood on this side and that side of the cut what happens is you will sever the fibers on one side of you cut but it'll still be attached to the others backed up so you start getting these ragged aspects of it you can see we have a nice cut on this side but this side it's already started flying out and that's gonna get worse and worse and worse the deeper you go into your cut the other thing you need to think of when you're getting rid of the waste is you are actually beginning the front of the next top so if you want a handle that comes out maybe one and a half times the length of the top so right there but your other top is going to be angled down here you can actually start your next tops getting rid of waste there so you can actually use the creation of this side of your next top as a waste removal tactic so a lot of times when I'm doing waste removal I will actually start up on this side and come back this way with a bunch of relief cuts but the thing is you can only go so far so deep I can't just plunge in and go all the way down to a very thin handle on the first cut because this wing right here the bottom wing it's cutting but the backside of it is also scraping so at a certain point it actually starts to grab and fight back and it just gets very hairy so it's better to take a bunch of small cuts to get down to your final thickness and then smooth it all out so I typically will begin where I want the end of my handle to be work my back what might work back one direction then the other direction it doesn't really matter which way you go cuz you'll end up in the same spot so here we go starting there I come in with my first cut it's touched the bevel lift make sure the shavings are coming off of this side because I'm going that way and notice I am open but can't it slightly closed in the direction I'm going there we go one cut notice is ragged on one side and after a certain point you can just kind of stops but the next cut I can go a little bit deeper I can go a little bit but you see how it's ragged on this side all you're actually basically doing right now is creating an escape path for the wood and at this point I will typically deal with this edge right here now it comes out to a very tight point but no matter how I cut it or how sharp my tool is it's always a tad bit rough rough it feels serrated because of the grain direction now you could finish the entire top and then just come back and sand this one corner but that's one extra step so I've lately I've kind of got in the habit of at this point where it's very thick on the handle I will finish this by just taking a very slight cut on that corner to add a lower angle devil just that right there and now all of a sudden it is very smooth to the touch it's not serrated it still has an edge so it makes a nice crisp thing and it gives some kids something to color on the very rim but I don't have to go back and sand it I'm not gonna stay in this thing at all if I if I can get away with it but coming back here see how rough those cuts that's basically I came in this direction with the cut and those fibers just broke off but now that I've gotten the face there edge there in the back corner somewhat the way I want I'm now going to start removing the rest of this handle and at this point I will start going back this direction notice I'm taking a finer cut on this last pass that's gonna be the face of the next top as I said before so now we've got a Dan you know very rough it's about a third of the distance now if you want to clean up the back or add shapes to the back now is a time because when if it gets any thinner you're gonna induce some vibration and I'll show you a trick of using that vibration in a second but we're starting out with just a basic top so what I will do is remember me talking about these bevels earlier see if I can get it okay you see I got my front bevel there if I angle a little bit more you see the back the back one's just me removing waste material and this front bevel it's very thin it starts here and I've actually got this pretty thick for what I'm about to do and it goes around so it's only from here to here that is what's setting the angle of all my cuts right off that one pivot point so I can do that one because I'm going to drop the cut down to the very corner and I'm only going to be working this distance right here on my edge and that way I can come in and turn a very tight Cove on the bottom if you watch how the shavings come off of that you could see where how I'm cutting it I come in lay speeds up I engage the blade I come down that transition right there is really important for the quality of the overall top you want something smooth and easy to do if you put a sharp bend right there a shower angle you you'll end up spending a lot more time working on that one a nice gentle curve works pretty well and then you can just get rid of the rest of the waste okay you can do that two different ways what I just did right there was a dragging cut a skewing cut I'll go over that a little bit more in a second but if you turn that corner with your blade and that's more of a pushing cut and just go as thin as you feel comfortable I will say this you can get them extremely thin but once it's you know twice the thickness of a lead of a pencil I would go to much thinner for younger kids they have a harder time doing it actually the thicker they are for the younger kids it works out a little bit better so now I have a nice smooth cut and I took my time on that last cut to make it as smooth as possible if you rush that last cut you might get a little bit tearing out and the ink from the marker will spread out as it goes up and down the fibers if you can get it a smoother cut you get a better lines right there now real quickly let me talk about that pushing and dragging cut the difference so I have my tool right here as the re clean up that face which means I'm cutting on the bottom edge and the point is leading so I come over here I add the tip that I like if I want ad in this but I'm always pushing with that pointing ad I come over to the end I add some corner of that line there we go now when you're climbing down that finer and finer handle most of the time I revert to what they call a pulling cut or a skewed cut so I have asked you right here and when you're using the skew you can see I've got the blade right there as the wood cut enters into it it's actually feeding into the skew and you kind of fold it over but the skew is moving this way the angle is down so you come over you touch the bevel you get the cutting edge and I'm moving along and with the angle so you basically believe that lay the blade down and as it goes across the wood you kind of the wood is actually coming into it and the angle that it prick creates is about 40 degrees and I am basically moving forward in that 40 degrees instead of going tip first I'm doing the blade first well I can do the same exact thing with my skew instead of pushing into the cut if I bring the back of the handle down I can actually slide that blade along the wood at the forty to forty forty-five degree angle okay and they'll get me ask you in cut and it gets a nice smooth you'll get you in very nice finish but notice I am not engaging the blade at the corner yeah the tip I'm actually doing it along the side and when I'm doing this a lot times I'm not doing it as radically down here on the blade I'm actually doing it kind of up in this area because it's a very fine video that we're working on and I'll do it in both directions and I kind of drag it back and forth instead of pushing it one way or the other so here we go I'm gonna use that pushing cut to get rid of a lot of the way I'm gonna clean up my edge I'll use another pushing shot and the rest of the waste out and then I'm going to come over I'm going to stick the corner and and do it somewhat pushing what about pushing to get the corner [Music] and he can give very nice finish eventually they work around my camera so I can't really see what I'm doing one more time I come back in I push it into the corner I get back that's a push cut that's a pulling cuff skewing cut draggin cut it gets you very nice shavings okay real quickly I'm going to show you another technique for getting rid of some of that waste it's a little bit more of an advanced technique and I'm going to show you some things that you really shouldn't do but with practice you'll be able to accomplish them safely and it the reason why I want to show to you is a lot of people will sit there and they'll start saying I mean this is just mesmerizing watching you and that's the kind of person you are trying to entertain with some race smooth cuts where the shape just kind of comes out after you coming in and roughing out those cuts with a bunch of what they call v cuts half of it or it gives off ragas that's not pretty yeah that's what I'm talking about it's not elegant cut so what I'm about to show you is using that dragging technique that pulling technique to get rid of waste in a way that's visually pleasing now when you're turning in especially when you're getting thin things thin you always want to go towards the tailstock because if you're pulling it out if there's any slight catch or any kind of roughness the torque action will actually break things off so the general consensus is you always want to go towards a headstock unless you just absolutely have to for like you're turning a beat or something like that but in those situations it's a fairly thick piece of wood we're coming down to something that size of pencil lead and at that level it can easily break off but I'm going to tell you go against those rules so I'm going to start out same exact way I always do it starting at about where I want the tailstock to end I come over and I rough it out waiting up that one edge now right now this is pretty level at a certain at a certain depth I don't win them in about half the distance of my play so I'm gonna come back from this side and clean up the cut and I'm actually getting shavings coming off down here around that bend so it's actually a pulling cut even though I'm coming at the angle because I'm not actually engaging the tip area now if I were to just transition over and come back the other way I could do a pull and cut that direction using this portion of the blade and go back and forth but what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually stop short of hitting this edge on the shoulder does that have caused a catch and it'll want to rotate around same thing on this side so I'm basically going to go from short short short and you can you see wet work it but the idea you always want to go downhill so I'm going to start this way working this way and if you form a rapidly it's more visually pleasing and when I get down to this section I can come back in and with one swipe get down to some of my final shape come back the other way and then one final cut nice and slow to give you a nice spinner yeah I get it better than that pick up the edge my straight handle okay now when you're doing the handles this is another opportunity to introduce another science or academia lesson now I'm giving you all these kind of tip for the lessons to help sell it to build value to show people to build trust with the parents a relationship to show value back there all to build up the money that you can earn from what you're doing but you don't have to do every single one with every single kit pick and choose and that way when you have a crowd coming over every single kid will get a different experience and they'll be a lot more enjoyable for them then when they come back another time chances are you will hit them with another added benefit now we're turning a hands right there and if you have a kid in middle school and stuff like that that's where you can talk to them about gears and gear ratios and stuff so I'm turning this one you have a kid right there do you ride a bicycle does your bicycle have multiple gears it does okay I want you to think about the rear wheel on your bicycle all those gears you have on them which one of them makes you go faster the big one or the small one big one are you sure well think about this way you have your pedals that has a big gear on it right then you has a rear wheel well if your pedals in the rear wheel have the same size gear they turn at the same speed whenever you pedal right but if you have a small gear on the back one you turn this wheel one time this one has to turn a whole bunch of times to keep up correct so which one makes you go faster on the rear wheel small wheel there you go smug here well atop is just like your bicycle gear set you have a big gear that with just a one twist of your fingers you can make it go around maybe half a turn then you have a small gear with one twist of the fingers you'll make the top go around six or seven times so the smaller you get that handle the faster you can make your top spin so here's a question for you here's the handle we've got so far is that fast that for you yet no well here I'm gonna give you a life lesson you know what that means something you never forget somebody ever asked you is it fast enough standard answer always no got that remember that when you start driving okay so here we go come along that's fast enough for you no good answer okay that faster for you know you're learning okay now since you're not driving yet I'm gonna say this one right here it's fast enough at least until you getting your learner's permit and then go on from there okay it gave them a quick little mechanical engineering lesson on gear ratios now here's another lesson you can consider whenever you're doing the handles when you get it down to the bow the thickness of a pencil if you practice practice this at home before you do it in from the live crowd you can actually induce a squeal of vibration by cleaning up the backside of the handle and as you do it pressing ever so slightly against it this way and thou induce a vibration a squeal that you can actually control a little bit so you come over here your turn yet nut everything's been turning normal turning sound become oh you go clean at the back of it you hear that you know what that is that's a wood vibrating it's resonating in that's actually why they make musical instruments out of wood because different species will vibrate differently a different thicknesses that's why a violin made out of mahogany sounds a lot of different than the fiddle made out of maple but you can go along there talk about resonance vibrations that guy stuff you can take that as far as you want another cool thing is you can talk about how vibrations are equal they're kind of a pattern [Music] so I caused that vibration on the backside of the top now watch what happens when we cover it because this is a light-colored would take a darker color and if you just lightly skim it you're not pressing down onto it you're just going to touch the tops of those vibrations and it creates Kuno spiral now the next thing I want to talk about is color and color is one of those things that there's a lot of opportunity out there for you to bring added benefit to the presentation I mean you can sit there and talk about the color wheel tertiary complimentary you cook you can even talk about color mixing because what does yellow and blue make green and because sharpies are somewhat translucent the colors will blend with each other which is why if you get a kid that goes through the entire color packet on your in your display their top will probably end up looking like black this is additive color CMYK color you can talked about RGB versus CMYK ones with light ones with eggs now I think I've talked about earlier I do recommend you get the sharpie I found that they've last a lot longer but more importantly the tip and the tip is one of those lessons where you can present the information in a way that the kid or the student can come up with the answer on their own it can boost their confidence it can get them to realize that real-life experience is a lesson of themselves they can learn on their own so what a lot of times I would do is if I get a new kid out there and we're to the color stage I can ask them hey have you ever played around with paintbrushes well let me ask you do you ever dress D dragged the paintbrush or do you push the prank brush well what happens when you push a paintbrush yeah those the hair is kind of spread out and stuff I you can't get a weak crisp line right what believe it or not a Sharpie is just like a paintbrush except instead of hairs it's got little felt fibers running around to a very fine point so here's whenever I turned this lathe on its going to be rotating where the top of it is coming back towards me and the bottom is going towards you so in order to get a very fine line just like a paintbrush we want to drag it so let me ask you what part of the top will you want to put touch the marker to the top or the bottom if you want to get a crisp line then they can sit there and talk about you know think you know work and they'll figure out that on their side they want to touch it to the top and on your side you kind of want to touch it on the bottom so it drags a Marshall now if you see that one you'll also make your markers last longer the tip will stay blunt really young kids don't worry about it your these are disposable items they're gonna blunt those tips are going to jam it on there but if you haven't had a lot of added bonus opportunities in a specific display that's just another one and if you want a lot more one of my first videos I ever did was using turning a top just explain Newton's law so you can go back and look at that one and they'll give you a lot more information of things that you can come into the situation on to the next montage [Music] the last thing you want to do is take your top off and this you need to take into care you don't want to just break it off you actually want the end of your handle to heaven as good a tip as in front of it because I don't know how you're gonna do your toes but I guarantee all my tops to spin in multiple dimensions I called the doctor who Claus so you can spin it on either in upside down or right side up it's up to you so that point is incredibly important and that's why I bring out my skew is because it allows me to get a V cut now the skew in this situation is that one point that I'm dealing with and I am sharpening that constant cuz you really want it to slice of fibers so I'm gonna bring it up here I'm gonna make a series of V cuts but before I make my last cut you're gonna see me actually stop reach around to around it and I'm going to hold it here so it doesn't go flying anywhere and I'll catch it in my hand so here we go turn the speed up first cut just kind of compresses fibers and spreads them around second cut I come over a little bit more and just ease it in and it's following the angle of this bevel third cut I come back touch I'm going to go in about half way and I'm gonna let go with my hand bring it around and then I just kind of rotate it up and it finishes the cut and gives me a nice nice point so not only are you allowed to spin it one way but just by flipping it over just spin it upside down too so let's see how long you'll spin now if you have any other ideas for added benefits or academia that we can bring to a presentation such as this please leave those down in the comments below we can all benefit from more information if you like this video do me a big favor why favorite subscribe do all those social medias tell your friends I think I blew it over tell all your friends and if you want to visit worth AFRICOM where I have a lot more information on ways you can patronize us I run an online store blog I'll have plans and the features lots of different swag and stuff like that they're all that allows me to buy materials and subsidize my time for making such set of these videos and I want you to remember one last thing it is always worth the effort to learn create and share with others y'all be safe and have fun

Channel: wortheffort

Views: 225,916

Keywords: wortheffort, woodworking, wood working, wood turning, woodturning, turning, lathe, gouge, skew, spindle, toy, top, tops, wood, physics, science, academia, teens, toys, market, marketing, educate, sell, artist, farmers market, artist market, demonstration

Id: wpjogm7kJdQ

Length: 63min 4sec (3784 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 12 2018