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Get Bent! OK, I Will

Steam-bending wood is awesome, but I've never been a big fan of having a potential bomb in my house (or in the office). So I've worked at mastering cold-lamination bending, but I've found there's a lot of prep work (resawing, drum sanding, etc.), and the plastic resin glue is nasty stuff. It's the only glue that has ever gashed my arm.

So yesterday I pleased to see a big box propped up against my front door. Inside is a chunk of ash Compwood that I purchased from FlutedBeams.com. Compwood sounds like magical stuff – you can bend it cold, put it in your form and it retains any shape when it dries down to 6 or 7 percent moisture content.

There is no steam box. No plastic resin. Just cut the stuff and bend it.

How does it work? It is kind of like a flexible drinking straw. The wood is heated and then compressed along its length – so it's about 80 percent of its original length. This compresses the wood fibers like an accordion. As long as the wood is a little wet (20 to 25 percent MC), you can bend it in any plane. When it gets down to 12 to 14 percent MC, you can take it out of the form. When it reaches equilibrium, you can work it just like normal wood – rout it, plane it, glue it, sand it.

If you want technical details, including a manual on how to use the stuff for cabinetmaking, visit the official Compwood Products web site.

I'm going to be building a couple more Windsor chairs this summer, so I'm going to give the Compwood stuff a test run for the arms and the bows of the chairs. And I'll definitely post some video of the process.

— Christopher Schwarz

Other Wood Bending Resources to Investigate

• "The Complete Manual of Wood Bending" (Linden) Lon Schleining. It's a good introduction to the concepts of wood bending that I read years ago.

• The Ultimate Steam Box from The Windsor Institute. This is a nice system that we used to bend components during a chair class.

• February 2004 issue of Popular Woodworking. I wrote an article on cold laminations that I used to make an Eames coffee table.

• October 2005 issue of Popular Woodworking. Robert Lang demonstrates how to use cold bending to make contemporary shelves.

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Ceramic studio change-over

There's an interesting difference between being a potter and being a woodworker that most people don't consider. Woodworkers switch materials all the time, from job to job. Right now, I'm working on a cherry piece, but the next one I'll start is in oak. There isn't a significant difference; the adhesives and finishes are much the same, and it's not as if I have to change my sawblade if I've switched wood. Just a little cleaning with the air compressor and the changeover is complete.

But clay poses a different problem. For the last six years, I've used a deep brown clay body called Black Mountain. I love the way it fires to a chocolate brown color. But just as all things must change, I've started mixing some new glazes, and the bottom line is - the glazes I like simply look better on a lighter clay. I'm switching to a buff stoneware called Long Beach, which I've thoroughly tested and find works perfectly for my glaze palette.

Now many potters switch back and forth, but to me - it's a hassle. That means I have to clean everything from my canvas mats to my throwing tools, to my wheel. And since there is such a drastic color difference in the two clays I use, the slightest cross contamination really pops out.

So it's with some sadness that I used the very last of my Black Mountain clay this week. I've probably gone through several thousand pounds of it; not much by most potter's standards, but for me, that's a fair amount. I threw three pieces - two small pitchers and a tumbler, on the wheel, as my final farewell.

And now the changeover begins! Time to pack away all the old glaze tests, using that clay body.

A clean wheel!

And clean tools!

The plaster molds needed a little scrubbing and organization.

And the glaze area needed some straightening out. There were all sorts of slips and unlabeled mixtures, all of which went into the trash.

As long as I've giving you a tour of my clay studio, here's something that most people ask about when visiting. Call me silly, but I save my cone packs. I just think they look cool.

And finally, my current sketch wall. Whenever I'm working on a project, I sketch it in full-size, or print it with my computer. At times, the wall can be crowded with dozens of drawings, but right now - the the new clay being introduced - most of the older drawings have been retired, and new ones are being added daily.

Hope you enjoyed the little tour!

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INDICATING PARTS IN THE LATHE QUICKLY

Using appropriate ball bearing bolted to a piece of cold rolled makes indicating in the lathe a breeze!!

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wooden bowl carving course

I have just finished a very enjoyable 3 day bowl carving course. These 8 bowls were carved by 4 course participants.

This was only the second bowl course I have run, the first was a great success with students making 2 bowls each and a fantastic standard of work. I was unsure though whether we were just lucky with a very talented group and whether future groups would do as well. One of the pleasures of running courses is the nice folk that come along and the camaraderie of all working and learning together. This time we had just 2 folk who had been on previous spooncarving courses and the others had done varying amounts of green woodwork from quite a bit to none at all. Everyone had lots of enthusiasm though.

We work by clamping a halved log in a holding device I call a bowlmate (plans to make one on the website) and the bowl is hollowed using an adze. I have tried all the available adzes and my favourite is made by Hans Karlsson in Sweden, they are not cheap but they work very well. It is possible to hollow the bowl with a gouge but much faster with an adze. After the adze we tend to smooth the surfaces with a gouge and curved knife.

After shaping the outside with an axe and pushknife final finishing with the curved knife again.

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A little bit of refining the outside lines with a straight knife. I particularly liked Stephen's bowl with a ridge like a ships keel.

Carving this way is tremendously absorbing and we find it is important to stop every hour or so and have a walk around otherwise folk tend to get tired and that is when accidents happen.

And here are some finished bowls. Bowlcarving is a not quite as accessible as spooncarving in that you need to make a holding device and need a few more tools but it is tremendously rewarding and the results are beautiful and useful. Who wouldn't appreciate one of these bowls as a gift?

Check out this great review of the Jet JWL 1220 wood lathe.

wabi sabi

Very busy and behind with work at the moment but lots of interesting things which would be nice to share when I get time.

Today I just wanted to share a few thoughts on wabi sabi.

Ever since Bernard Leach went to Japan and wrote about Japanese aesthetics there has been great interest in the Japanese ideas about beauty. I was first introduced to the ideas through Leach's adaptation of Soetsu Yanagi's "The Unknown Craftsman". When I first read the book it was a revelation, it felt like it gave words to the feelings I already had, it gave a vocabulary to describe how simple humble things could be more wonderful than the glamorous and bling end of material culture that is often highlighted in Western museums and galleries. It suggested that the Japanese had words that explained these concepts which did not translate directly and had lots of subtle nuances difficult for outsiders to grasp but gives a fair explanation of the concepts in English.

"A certain love of roughness is involved, behind which lurks a hidden beauty, to which we refer in our peculiar adjectives shibui, wabi, and sabi."

Yanagi discusses shibui at length but suggests that wabi is to ephemeral a concept for most westerners to grasp. How tantalising a concept, not surprising then that wabi and sabi have become much used terms in the Western craft world even if we don't understand what they mean. We have this feeling that there is maybe something there that we admire, that if we could understand, would help us more fully understand the simple and humble in our own material culture. I suspect to some it also sounds rather grand using words that we don't fully understand in another language. There are numerous books on wabi sabi a typical one from my bookshelf is 'Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers". These are mostly written by Westerners trying to interpret what they think they have understood in the Japanese concepts for us. The above book is subtitled "Wabi Sabi is the quintessential Japanese aesthetic. It is the beauty of things imperfect, and incomplete. It is the beauty of things modest and humble." This actually sounds closer to the meaning of shibui than wabi or sabi to me though I have an incomplete understanding of all these words and prefer to use English terms which I understand fully.

The impetus for this post was what I think is a great blog post by a potter in Japan. Euan is a Westerner but he has lived and worked in Mashiko for 20 years (the pottery Village where Hamada lived and worked) This is the first paragraph of his post which I hope will encourage you to visit and read the rest, it is the simplest, clearest explanation of wabi sabi I have read, clearer and more comprehensive than most books on the subject.

"Just as in English there is a whole vocabulary available for the discussion of Art and Beauty, so too does such a vocabulary exist in Japanese. There is a tendency among people with a passion for and some experience in Japanese art to use the word “Wabi sabi”, and yet so little understanding of what the term refers to. Leonardo da Vinci said that, “If you cannot explain something, you don’t understand it.” To be anecdotal for a moment, there was one young American anthropologist who had studied pottery briefly in Mashiko, who gave a slide lecture here to coincide with an exhibition of American ceramics. Anything in his slides which seemed even vaguely Japanese influenced he described as possessing “Wabi sabi”. One of the thirty or so professional Japanese potters in the audience enquired, “What do you mean by Wabi sabi?” He laughed as he responded, “Nobody knows what Wabi sabi means!” The entire audience laughed also, but the young gentleman never realized that it was not because they agreed with him, but because of his naivety. Wabi sabi is not some mystical secret, but a basic aesthetic principal. Merely because he didn’t understand it doesn’t mean that it cannot be understood."

From Euan Craig's blog  11 may 2010

I would argue that we do not need Japanese words to understand these concepts, English is a remarkable language. What has been lacking in Western aesthetic discourse is an understanding of the humble, the simple. Perhaps the Shakers in the US came closest to this in the West. I remember in 1998 visiting the ethnographic museum in St Petersburg   This is a truly marvelous place, a grand imposing building, not unlike the British Museum or the V&A in London.

Inside are not the finest pieces of art and craft which form the material culture of the 1% at the top of society but the ordinary objects which formed the material culture of the 99% of Russian society. Where could I see the equivalent in the UK? Why do we always highlight the bling over and above the humble and the simple?

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DVD Review: Carving Swedish Woodenware

I first heard about the Carving Swedish Woodenware dvd (1990) from a blog post by Peter Follansbee and immediately contacted Drew Langsner about purchasing a copy.

Jögge Sundqvist packs a huge amount of information into one hour and shows you with complete clarity how to make a dough bowl and spoon using only hand tools.

First, he splits a log in two and explains why he chooses one half over the other for the dough bowl. Then, he uses his axe to create a flat surface on the convex side that will become the bottom of the bowl. He rough-shapes the inside with an adze and explains the proper tool grip and stance for maximum leverage.

Next, he uses gouges to finish the inside, then works the outside with an axe. Jögge talks during the entire film, explaining safe procedures, bowl design, and tool use.

When the outside of the bowl is shaped, he refines it at the workbench with spokeshave, drawknife, and plane.

I was surprised to see that he did not use a shaving horse. Instead, he worked the dough bowl on a workbench and tree stump and carved the spoons in his lap.

The second half of the film shows how to carve spoons. He shows two ways to rough out the shape: with a turning saw and with an axe. He explains what to look for when choosing a branch and how to shape the spoon for ease of use.

Always safety conscious, Jögge spends a lot of time explaining proper knife grips and how, by using these techniques, you cannot cut yourself.

He shapes the spoons with straight and crooked knives and gouges, and then shows how to carve decorative elements.

Jögge uses linseed oil (not boiled) on spoons and bowls for a natural finish.

The photo above shows all the tools you need if you'd like to make your own woodenware. And the first "tool" on your list should be Jögge's video. I cannot say enough good things about it.

You can find lots of good information on wood lathe tools here.