Peter Brown's ShopTime

I hate turning this stuff... but boy they sure do look pretty!! Blue Acrylic Cross Style Pen. Polished 12000 MM SOLD Pink Acrylic Cross Style Pen. Polished 12000 MM SOLD

Just a small craft show. I did OK. Sold a bowl, a few pens and an handful of stoppers. Have another on this Wednesday

5. 1, 2, 3, 4 & 5. It happens. We all make mistakes at in the shop. I've had tough days where nothing seemed to go right. Sunday was one of them. 5 failures in a row. I was turning bracelets for an upcoming craft fair. I'm a little low on stock and very low on time. In fact I only have a week left to finish a whole bunch of stuff. All you can do is shrug it off and not worry about it. Or what I did. Take all the pieces inside and burn them in the fireplace laughing like a an evil supervilian. That works too...

Pink Acrylic Cross style pen SOLD Polished to 12000 MM to a mirror shine. Very cool pen.

Purple Acrylic polished to 12000 Mico Mesh. I really like the look of this one! SOLD Jatoba (AKA Brazillian Cherry) with homemade friction polish SOLD And a couple of Walnut bracelets also with homemade friction polish SOLD

Acquired some small olive blocks last month. Just the right size for some stoppers. Dropped them off at the consignment shop... All with a CA finish

Curly Maple with a shiny CA finish. SOLD Maple & Yellowheart with a CA finish. SOLD Mesquite with a shiny CA finish. SOLD Corian (The countertop material) Polished to 12000 grit. SOLD Purpleheart with a shiny CA finish. SOLD Zebra Acrylic Polished to 12000 grit. SOLD

I was in Santa Clara last week for training and visited this place. It was like a wood turners Mecca. They also have slabs and lumber, but I've got a local place that does that too. What I don't have is three rows of shelves stuffed with exotic turning blocks! And the prices were great. Global Wood Source Exotics: Lumber & Slabs $123 Claro Guitar slabs Domestics: ($4 per lb Maple burl.) I also hit up their scrap bin and scored a 2x3x12 block of Olive and a small block of zircote for $5 each. A portion of the olive has already been turned into some bottle stoppers. A very cool shop!

Even with the shear number of folks selling woodworking items on Ebay, I still have managed to sell more pens via Ebay in the past 2 months then I ever did from a year of being in a shop. Plus I get more for each item while it cost the end user less! All this because I don't have to split my sales with a shop, or deal with the possible product loss or poor product placement. Just when I thought Ebay was becoming irreverent, it goes and surprises me.

I love the colors on both of these, for different reasons. Yellowheart SOLD is just so happy. It's odd to see such a bright yellow in nature and I have trouble not being awed by it. CA finish. The second is a Redwood Burl. SOLD A beautiful pen, with loads of figure and a grain. CA finish.

I finally got my toggle clamps and digital angle gauge in the mail. The Wixey gauge eliminated all the fiddling and guess work. What a great tool! Soo... cut another 16" chunk of maple and started again down the box making road. Planning to 3/8 I then rebuilt my crosscut sled and tried to eliminate all the slop in it. I added my new Chinese toggle bolts and clamped a stop block at 3". Clamping before had been downright scary with a 3" side and 45 degree bevel. Not anymore. I wrapped a couple pieces of mdf in packing tape as my cauls for the 3/8 box sides. Result? Really nice and tight miters! (a bit of tear out, but I can fix that) Next weekend, on to the spline cutting jig!

The guy I sold my shells and hardware to, recently sent me pictures of his completed kit. He did an amazing job!! There was a small pang of regret when I saw them all decked out in their new black sparkle glory but the truth is, I would never have played them. Plus he did an outstanding job, and I wasn't fairing anywhere near as well as that! He should get a ton of use out of them now, and loads of pride to boot! Before: And after: close up on the snare: Here's a link to the Photostream with more shots. Well done Gabriel!

I've just started following Mike Mahoney's Blog . I found this picture. I'm no longer concerned with the mess around my lathe...

I finally decided to pull the trigger. I've had my dust collector for almost two years but haven't hooked it up to anything. It was just a glorified vacuum. So it was a clumsy build, but I hope to refine it as I go... Where I started I purchased 40 feet of 4" PVC. I did the rough cuts with a Japanese pull saw, but cleaned up the end with my band saw. I was short some fittings, but I wanted to complete a run with what I had on hand. Took me quite a while to get a layout I liked. All the way down to the lathe. Again, this was an "Add, Remove, Reconfigure" process. Total time for one run and my RAS was about 4 hours. Now I know what additional fixtures I need and how to complete the second and third runs. I've still have quite a bit PVC left...

Buckeye Burl SOLD on Elegant Sierra with Mesa theme. That stuff is a PAIN to turn. Very soft and unstable. I lost 3 blanks (even with my skew honed on the WS to 4000 grit) Finally nailed the fourth one. 12 or so coats of CA Spalted Maple SOLD (has some cool green streaks) Elegant Sierra with Mesa theme. CA finish. Stuff was super soft and I ended up just soaking it in with CA Evey few days. Came out beautifully!

4 inches wide 1 1/4 high. Finished with Danish Oil. SOLD