Minutes for February 19

Minutes for February 19, 2013 meeting
of the Tennessee Valley Woodworkers

President Kevin Deuermeyer called the meeting to order at 7:06 PM.

Members in attendance: (64)
Guests: (5) Norm Bennett, Murfreesboro; Don Far, northern Alabama; Alvis Gilbert, Manchester; Ken Delaney, Hillsboro; Max Kneese, Winchester
New Members: (2) Keith Cummings, Estill Springs; Wayne Courington, ?

Reminders:

President Deuermeyer reminded all guest to sign the guest sheet.
General meeting always on the third Tuesday of each month
Carvers meeting are always the first Saturday of each month
Signup for the Super Door Prize. A clipboard was passed around for members to signup for the grand door prize to be presented at the Christmas party.

Club events for 2013:

Club Picnic will be in May 11 or 18.
Turning Bee will be June 1.
Coffee County Fair will be September 13-21.
Christmas Party will be December 13.
University of the South Exposition will be May 5-18, 2013.
Panoply will be April 25-28 in Huntsville
Seminars, Workshops, Shop Tours are all TBA.

Carvers Event:

Meetings are held at Phil Bishops shop the 1^st Saturday of each month
Cornbread Festival will be April 27-28.
Dogwood Festival will be May 3-5 in Winchester.
Polly Crockett Festival will be September in Cowan.
Huntsville Show will be sometime in November or December.

Announcements:

Gladys Chattin passed away on 1/17/2013. She was a past member of the club.
Maurice Ryan is at Life Care Center, Tullahoma. He has been a member since 1998.
President Deuermeyer encouraged everyone to us the TVW Forum. The more folks use it, the better the database becomes.
Greg Myers corrected the dates for Panoply to be held in Huntsville on April 25, 26, 27 and 28, 2013. The first two days are primarily for children in grades 2 thru 4 while the last two are open to the public. Contact Greg for information.
Greg Myers announced that the North Alabama Wood Crafters will be holding their first seminar on Saturday March 23 at New Market. In addition to sessions led by local folks they are bring in Donna Hill from northern Kentucky to demonstrate Federal period inlay techniques. The cost including food will be $25. A flier with more information will be available soon. Until then, contact Greg for information.
President Deuermeyer reminded about the Patriot Woodworker Project and their support of Houses for Our Troops Find information at www.patriotwoodworker.com .
President Deuermeyer mentioned an article in the Southern Standard about Bob Malloy, a long time member of TVW. Bob was recently honored by being inducted into the Ryobi Hall of Fame, based on several items that he has built, including his beautiful wood strip canoe. Construction of that canoe was the subject of a program that Bob presented to the past meeting of the TVW.

Old Business

President Deuermeyer reminded the membership that dues for the 2013 year are due and payable to Bob Addington.
Tools for Sale on the club web page. Contact Loyd Ackerman

Larry Wendland announced that he is helping sell his brother-in-law’s woodworking tools. He passed around a list and had pictures of larger items. Contact Larry if you are interested.
Vince Zaccardi had four wood chisel sets to sell. They were found at the Fine Arts Center and came originally from Hawk’s Hardware. Vince is asking $11 per set.

New Business

President Deuermeyer opened a discussion on the impact of changing the TVW meeting time from 7 to 9 PM to an earlier 6:30 to 8:30 PM. The change has been proposed to benefit members and presenters who live outside the area by allowing them to return home at an earlier hour. Look for the subject again on next month’s agenda.

Show and Tell for the February meeting:

Jay Hazel brought a slide show that featured a Mission style headboard that he built for his daughter. He explained the steps required to go from raw wood to the finished product and described problems encountered and several innovative jigs and assembly procedures that he used. He also showed several items that he has built over the years, including, sets of shelves for his home, lots of turned Christmas ornaments, a pair of night stands, a computer center, a walnut mirror frame, Colorado cedar stair rails, and a set of FIFO (first in first out) pantry boxes for storing can goods.
Vince Zaccardi brought a cherry free-standing shelf unit that he built from Wood magazine plans. The shelves were finished in linseed oil while the base box and back beam were sprayed with high-gloss black paint. He also showed pictures he took at the Appalachian Craft Show.
Tom Gillard brought an end-grain Southern yellow pine cutting board that he built after seeing one like it at William Sonoma in Nashville. He also described how he modified 6-in sticky-back 60-grit sanding disks for use on a perforated-disk hook-and-loop sander.
Bob Leonard brought “Jim Bob”, a wood figurine that he carved based on a ceramic original owned by a friend as his pattern. The piece took Bob a month to carve, and he considers it to be his best ever head carving, even though Jim Bob has a fuzz under his nose from a sanding oversight and his lips were chapped from being out in the weather.
Henry Davis brought a cherry bowl that he recently turned. The small size of the bowl required removal of four stoppers from his Longworth chuck (four remaining). During the first attempt to turn the bottom, the bowl moved. He was able to take the bowl out, tighten the stoppers, re-center the bowl, and achieve a true bottom turning. The bowl was sanded to 400 grit and finished with Briwax.
Bob Reese used a garment storage bag to make a small-scale version of Loyd’s large vacuum press bag. He used the smaller bag to inlay a 32-piece cherry and rosewood compass star into the back of a violin that he is building. He milled the recess for the 1/64^th inch thick inlay using a Dremel router base. Parts of the inlay were temporarily held together with veneer tape and covered in the press with paper towels and cork shelf liner material. The violin back was left solid (not hollowed out) during the process to prevent the estimated 10 lb/sq in force from crushing the piece. Bob estimates two months to finish the violin, and he will bring it in for his first wife to play a tune for us.
Loyd Ackerman brought the first carving he made using his new CNC router. The rose outline was traced from a picture and vectorized using VCarvePro software to produce the router cut instruction file. Loyd pointed out that the CNC system could have been programmed to mill a decorative border, drill mounting holes, and cut the piece to final size - - - amazing.
Ross Roepke showed an unfinished oak table he is building for a local benefit auction. His design was inspired by a recent back cover photo on Fine Woodworking magazine.
Stan McKinnon brought an unfinished box elder demo bowl and the special mandrel attachments required to turn on a spring pole lathe. He usually turns larger 14-inch bowls from freshly cut pear wood on shop-built pole lathes similar to the one he inherited from his granddad. Stan described the construction and operation of pole lathes, and explained how he makes traditional hook tools in a home-built two-brick forge. He also brought a copy of a Viking ale cup that he turned. Ken’s granddad was a chair maker and used pole lathes to turn chair spindles and other parts. Ken will present a program on pole lathes at the June TVW meeting.
Bob Cantrell brought a large bowl he turned from a burl cut from a large white poplar tree on his neighbor’s place. The standing part of the tree, after being struck by lightning two years ago, was eleven feet tall and five feet in diameter. The wood is kind of “funny” with lots of knots and wet and dry places throughout. Bob asked for advice for dealing with wood having the wide variation of moisture content that he is finding in the bowl blanks.
Doug Dulap brought a peppermill that he turned from cherry and oak segmented rings. He glued a plug into the hollow assembly for a tenon to attach the lid, but had trouble getting it in straight. He suggested that a longer plug would have been easier to align.
Mark Ledbetter (member of TVW for a year) thanked the club for sponsoring the turning bee. Bought Henry’s lathe and set up in Tom Cowan’s shop. He got frustrated trying to turn a walnut blank left from the turning bee and didn’t touch a gouge for several months. He didn’t have the tools that were called for in Loyd’s segmented bowl workshop, so he started back to bowl turning with a vengeance. In the few months since then he has turned 118 bowls to various stages of completion.
Mick Knowles brought in bowls he turned from a maple tree cut in his yard and from a chunk of cherry that a friend gave him. He also brought two segmented turnings that he bought in Honduras for $11 and $15.
Goeff Roehm brought in ten wood samples to challenge our identification skills. He asked folks to examine closely and post their answers on the TVW Forum. Goeff hinted that eight of the wood species were indigenous and only two were exotic, and he promised to post the answers on the forum within a few days.
Bryan Gordon brought a drop leaf maple table that he is restoring. The table has been passed down in his family for several generations and was in pretty bad shape. After minimal success using Formby’s and other products to remove the seven or more coats of various paints, he sprayed on air conditioner condenser coil cleaner and was able to wipe the paint right off. He replaced rails and slides underneath with well-seasoned poplar and replaced rusted out bolts and nuts that attached the legs.

Program: Using Staves (Straight or Tilted) in Segmented Turning

Presented by Loyd Ackerman

Member/Speaker Loyd Ackerman was introduced by Vice President Karen Browning.
Loyd began with a commercial. “Every single question that came up about the club (during the meeting) is (answered) either on the website or on the Forum, but you don’t get it if you don’t look at it.”.
Loyd explained that turning stave vessels is one of the several types of segmented turning. Construction methods can involve open or closed segment rings, straight or tilted staves, or various combinations. He showed several examples of the different types of segmented vessels made by himself and others.
For his closed-ring segmented vessels, Loyd cuts and glues up sets of trapezoidal-shaped segments into a series of flat closed rings. He then sands and glues a stack of rings together and finally turns away the surface waste to form smooth inside and outside vessel contours.
The cut angle for a trapezoidal segment is equal to the number of segments in the ring divided into 180, e.g., for an sixteen-segment ring the cut angle would be 180/8 = 11.25 degrees.
The segment length is equal to the ring diameter multiplied by the tangent of the cut angle, e.g., for a 10-inch-diameter sixteen-segment ring the segment length would be 10 x tan(11.25) = 10 x 0.198912367 = 1.989 inches.
Loyd uses shop-built sleds on his table saw to make the precision cuts required for segment assembly.
For straight stave segmented vessels, the cut angle for ripping a stave is calculated the same way as the cut angle for the trapezoidal segment above, e.g., for an sixteen-stave tube the cut angle would be 180/80 = 11.25 degrees (the blade angle with the table would be 90 minus 11.25 = 78.75 degrees). Loyd uses a Wixey digital gage to set the table saw tilt angle to within 0,1 degrees.
Straight stave width is computed the same way as the trapezoidal segment length above, e.g., for a 10-inch-diameter sixteen-stave tube, the stave width would be 10 x tan(11.25) = 10 x 0.198912367 = 1.989 inches. Stave material is ripped in long strips and cut to final lengths using a stop block on the table saw.
Staves are laid edge to edge and outside down on a flat surface with the outside (bottom) edges joined with masking tape. The assembly is rolled up to “dry fit” and check for closure before finally applying lots of glue and clamping.
Cutting parts for tilted stave segmented vessel construction can be significantly more complicated, since compound cut angles are required. Loyd uses an Incra miter gauge for setting miter angle to within 0.5 degrees and a Wixey angle gauge to set bevel angle to 0.1 degrees on the table saw.
Since the material is flipped before cutting each tapered stave, it is often desirable to separate the odd and even numbered pieces into two sets for best grain match. Once the saw is set up, It is good to make multiple sets anyway.
Special clamping fixtures and techniques for clamping the tapered glue-ups were discussed. Sacrificial glue blocks are often required for flat-angle tapered stave cones. Loyd has been more successful gluing half of the staves together at a time rather than gluing them all at once. He then trues up the faces of the two halves on a disk sander before gluing them together.
Note 1: Loyd has placed cut angle tables for making segmented rings and straight staves on the TVW website, along with compound miter/bevel angle tables for making tilted staves.
Note 2: The TVW Club library has a DVD (#2019) by Loud Ackerman entitled “An Introduction to Turning Segmented Vessels” The video presents the basics of calculating, cutting, and gluing for segmented ring vessels. Calculations for segmented stave vessels are similar, but cutting and glue-up can be much more complicated if the staves are tilted.