My Biggest Woodturning to Date!

[Music] creating something that was going to be an heirloom piece that was going to be passed down you know through three generations that people with love and cherish and that would really be a centerpiece in their you know seeing it in the homes you know seeing it being used it's it's special and it doesn't I don't take that lightly it's the kind of thing where you know it's not just a piece that we're working on we see it for a couple of weeks but the idea that it still lives on people have you know real it adds meaning to life is everything I recently had the opportunity to travel to st. Louis for work and while I was there I was able to visit one of the barolo tables in the home of the pecker family this project has meaning for me on a number of different levels most notably it was a challenge of scale and execution that I had never undertaken before and the first two tables were made during a difficult year of my life things had not turned out the way I planned or the way I had hoped and here was a chance to prove to myself what I was really capable of [Music] I have done the turning for four of these tables each one had its own particular set of challenges whether it was figuring out how to lift and mount the blank for the first one trying to find the right help so that I wasn't turning something that's dangerous alone or trying to get these pieces turned in a limited amount of time and over the holidays I was continually questioning my process to make it safer and more efficient [Music] the first table was made of ash and then ebonized I turned the pedestal for this table but not the foot the second table was made of cherry the blank was glued up at Goble furniture in st. Louis and then shipped to Charleston for me to turn although I was shipped the blank for the foot it was too unstable and unsafe to turn something this large could kill in an instant if the wood failed so in the interest of timing I had to turn the foot in st. Louis the third table was walnut and for that one Martin and his friend James drove the Blake's from st. Louis with a plan of making and video about the entire process of the Barolo table the fourth table was also made of walnut and it had to be turned over Thanksgiving week last year so it was tough to find anyone to be here with me for safety reasons I don't like to turn something that's large without someone else around just in case anything should go wrong luckily I was able to find a friend at the last minute [Music] a lot of people don't have the opportunity to see how a piece like this is made so I think it's important to start from the beginning it starts with the tree Missouri is home to some of the most commonly used hardwoods for furniture making white oak and walnut in particular the gobo furniture team is able to use locally salvaged lumber trees that were due to come down for one reason or another to create many of their pieces including the Barolo table but harvesting lumber is not a simple easy or fast process [Laughter] first the log has to be milled and these boards are left a little extra fit compared to the usual commercially available kiln dried lumber then the milled boards need to dry trees are full of water when they're first cut and the trick is to get the wood dry without losing too much material do the cracking and warping each board gets sealed at the ends to prevent the ends from drying too quickly and cracking and the boards get stacked with stickers or strips of wood in between to allow air to flow through the stack these boards need to air dry for up to two years before they're ready to become a piece of furniture once the lumber is dry it needs to be milled using the jointer and planer so that it is perfectly flat and true on both sides it also gets cut down to the appropriate sized pieces to glue up the second third and fourth table have stave style glue ups for the pedestal this means that the blank looks like a pie and in this case a 12-sided pot each piece of the pie is made of six layers of walnut glued together once these layers are glued together they're cut roughly to shape on the bandsaw and here you can see how they are going to fit together the accuracy of this glue up is crucial as I mentioned a piece this large could potentially kill a person immediately if it comes apart while it's on the lathe and while I do everything I can to mitigate the dangers there's still a significant amount of just centrifugal force while it's spinning on the lathe it has to be dead-on no pun intended so these pieces are each CNC cut in order to assure the accuracy and a perfect fit they use a knotch running down the piece to fit a small piece of wood that will help locate the pieces of the pie against each other and there is a piece that gets inserted over the hollow Center at each end so that I can mount it on the lathe it's all hands on deck when this glue up goes together so that everything can be tight and perfect before the glue starts to dry and then it's off to Charleston [Music] now I am not about to lift this 300 pound behemoth out of the van on my own I've got an engine hoist for that and we put a recess into the blanks for the foot of my faceplate has an added level of safety because the pedestal is designed to fit in maximum capacity at my big mark lathe at 23 inches the corners need to be planed off before it will even begin to turn I decided to roughed her in the foot first since the wood will start to move as I cut it down to size if I did all of the turning at once it would change shape after I was finished which is not conducive to a dining table that we want to sit flat the plan is to take off some of the material and let this piece rest for a couple of days while I work on the pedestal I have two big mart lathe so we would be able to speed things up by having Martin sand the pedestal on the one leg while I worked on the foot on my other leg now best laid plans in all things did not go according to plan about five minutes into rush turning the foot the inverter dies on one of these lathes leaving us with just the one large enough for this project and the boys need to be back in st. Louis in a few days so we'll come back to that the pedestal Blanc goes onto the lathe in the same way it came out of a band with my engine hoist similar to the foot we have mounted a face plate into a recess that was created at the end of a blank for a little extra safety we created a hole on the opposite side for my live Center for the same reason I want to get this ceased into the Chuck as quickly as possible so it's only between centers long enough for me to turn a tenon and then we spin the piece around again to grip it with my Chuck so once we turn the lathe on I have to start it turning very very slowly because it is a large blank even though we did everything that we possibly could to make sure that it was well balanced and it was round it's still gonna be a little bit off until I get the entire surface of the piece so I started with a lathe slow with a roughing gouge just skim the surface and get it down to round and then starting at this end using a 5/8 bowl gouge I started to remove some of the materials so this is of course nowhere close to what it's going to look like it's sort of making a number of roughing cuts to remove some of the bulk of the material that's not going to be needed on these [Music] [Music] so he sent me to drawing and I thought okay there's there's no problem with me turning that shape all of the all of the forums that curves everything everything that was in that shape or something that I was comfortable working with I do have to admit at this point I know that I hadn't actually turned anything that big yet he heard about me through some of his contacts in the furniture world I think somebody that I had turned some table legs for before a guy named Brian Boggs had given Martin my name and I think he looked at a number of different Turner's a number of different avenues for getting this job done and he decided to go with me [Music] Ashley came really highly recommended from a gentleman named Brian Boggs a legend within the furniture world so we created a number of files for her she printed them out in full scale she took our digital precision and brought that into the physical world just with handcraft and we knew we had the right person for the team I called my mentor who's been turning longer than I've been alive and I asked if he had any recommendations for her tackling such a massive project and we talked about it and figured out a few things that would help to make it possibly a little bit easier and definitely safer and at the end of the conversation he said you know Ashley I've never turned anything this big [Music] the Barolo table was not something I could have possibly attempted in the first few years I'd been turning it was a challenge in every way it was a challenge in logistics from scheduling to moving the blank to mounting the blank and taking it off again without dinging it it was a challenge and skill and strength because these pieces have to turn so slowly in order to turn safely it is more difficult to hold the gouge steady on the tool rest and was the third one my outboard tool rest was not tall enough and had to be on a platform which made it bounce around more another added challenge and then there was the level of courage that I have to find to turn the lathe on with a piece like this anyone should be a bit afraid of turning on this scale and while I made every effort to turn these tables as safely as possible it was still a bit scary I remember telling Tyler who was working with me on the first table that I was scared to turn the lathe on after we spent an entire day figuring out how to mount it I mentioned that this was a tough year in my life and while I was proving to myself that I could tackle this massive undertaking I was encouraged by people watching from all over the world this was my introduction to Instagram I didn't have an account of my own at the time but it was incredible to see how many people were following along through the goggle furniture feed it was a testament to the positive impact and the reach that social media can have I like to think that this project showed that you don't have to have a state of the art workshop or be large in stature to create something on this scale I have only turned four barolo tables and will not be working on anymore but the stories of these four were seen by tens of thousands of people [Music] remember how I mentioned that the inverter had failed and left us with one life well I had to figure out how to get these pieces done in time for the guys to head back to st. Louis I got this idea that I had never seen anyone else do before to mount both the pedestal and the foot on my one working Vic mark at the same time one inboard and one outboard that way Martin could work on scraping and sanding the pedestal while I finish during the foot and luckily it worked [Music] you can see here how much the wood has moved over a couple of days I start by trimming up what will be the bottom of the foot and this helps to get the piece balanced it also helps me to determine what the thickness of the final piece will be and Martin started working on power sanding the pedestal [Music] we decided that the code needed to be perfected a little in order to have the smoothest curve one of the challenges with the first three tables was working with straight tool rests which had a limited reach inside of this super large Cove so Martin got the crash course on negative rake scraping an easy and effective way to smooth out some of the inconsistencies in the curve so that I could go back to shaping the hook [Music] for the fourth table I had some custom tool Reza made by robust that made this job way easier they made one for the large Cove that was exactly the same curve so that I didn't have to constantly move around and switch out straight to rest in order to reach the surface they made another straight tool rest that fit my Oliver outboards stand so that I could have more height adjustment and not have to use the wooden platform underneath the stand that compromised my stability and of course the og curve on the foot needed to be perfect as well so we had both sets of eyeballs to check before perfect in the form [Music] [Music] we put a coat of oil on these turnings before they went back to st. Louis in order to minimize the wood movement before it went through final finishing back at Goble furniture it is such a satisfying feeling to watch that grain come to life you [Music] and a couple final touch-ups with a negative rake scraper [Music] a bit of final scraping and sanding Elif but [Music] [Music] [Music] one final pass along the bottom of the foot to make sure it sits flat [Music] [Music] and the foot is ready for a coat of oil [Music] you [Music] the tabletop gets created back at Google furniture don't worry I am not about to put an 80 inch round on my lathe this is their shop manager Jason Dacus routing and shaping the tabletop after it's cut to size the tabletop gets sanded and the bottom of the tabletop is rough shape to the router [Music] [Music] [Music] after final surfacing and sanding the top is ready for finish [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] back to my recent trip to st. Louis [Music] the pet curse have the most beautiful home that I'm seeing for the first time every detail was considered with as much handcrafted detail as possible in every room [Music] so the last time I saw this pedestal was when I put in the crate to shoot it off that was it it came off of the lathe on an engine hoist I had another guy that was working with me at the time so Tyler night put this thing in a crate and had it picked up and shipped off and then the foot I actually turned the hook for the table okay yeah and there actually I think there is a video out right now of the of the foot being turned so that video ended up having like a million and a half people watch it right now I mean literally I think it would 1.2 1.3 million people watched her turn the base of your table yeah when it came time for us to pick him to find a piece a dining room table that would fit in this in this space we came to market this is what what you all produce this is gorgeous we love it we get so many compliments from people it was a fun one we you can't just go to anybody to have it turning that large right it's the kind of thing where a lot of people look at you and just they will break their machine the property would and I called Ashley probably four years ago when we were trying to figure out how to do something of this magnitude and I had gotten her name from another gentleman that was also really respected in the woodworking world and there's maybe three people in the world that would actually do this and yeah we've never met in person when he hired me to turn the first one yeah we'd never met and I remember he said so I had this idea for this table and it's okay and he said it's really big turning I want to do a pedestal base you know can you do this and I said well he said well here's the capacity of my lathe and he goes okay that's what we're doing traditionally we've gotten together the whole family would get together most of the family get together for Thanksgiving and for Christmas and since we've moved in we've hosted Christmas every year and so we'll have a hundred you know are some people here so this table will be full of people enjoying Christmas dinner it just it couldn't have a better place to live it's so cool to see it in here thank you so much for letting who's coming [Music] [Music] I mentioned that Martin gobo and his friend James came to Charleston to create a video about the 3rd barolo table sadly James passed away a few weeks after shooting this footage this video is dedicated to the memory of James Dixon thank you for watching

Channel: Ashley Harwood

Views: 1,422,007

Rating: 4.8084393 out of 5

Keywords: ashley harwood, woodturning, wood turning, barolo table, tables, barolo, pedestal, table foot, goebel, goebel furniture, martin goebel, lathe, dangerous, huge, massive, scary, lathes, ashleyharwoodturning, stuart batty, face shield, charleston, st louis, woodworking, table making, furniture making, woodturner, wood turner, girl, female, maker, builder, table top, vicmarc, injury, large, robust lathe, chuck, cherry, ash, walnut, milling, gouge, bottom bowl, lumber, roughing, wood, project, projects, wooden, design

Id: DmZFA4AvJYs

Length: 26min 34sec (1594 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/GardnersGrendel]

It's curious that, despite being CNC milled, the wedges that make up the pedestal weren't cut with some of the profile already in them. It seems like this would have saved a huge amount of weight and turning time. Either way it's seriously impressive in scale and execution.

[u/DaDa462]

Normally if there’s a catastrophic failure turning, you could get smacked in the head with flying debris. But in this situation, it would be more like getting run over by a truck.