September 23, 2023

I needed an easy win today. I went to the workshop. It didn’t quite work out the way I was hoping it would.

I knew that I should’ve made a plan before going. My mind has been so scattered lately that all of the shiny things are interesting. Whimsical would be romanticising my flakiness. Incidentally, Flake is my favourite chocolate bar.

Earlier in the week, I started working on a yarn bowl for an order that I received. I’ve been practising using my bowl gouge, which feels like driving a manual transmission for the first time. It wasn’t going smoothly, as such, but it was going well. Until, that is, the end.

The bowl had taken shape, I was just finishing the bottom of the inside, getting it smoothed out. The corners were a bit tricky because they turn like an elbow bends. I had switched to my carbide tools because I wanted to make sure to get things right. That damn corner just wasn’t coming together so I thought I’d give my bowl gouge a go.

Bam! A catch.

The tenon broke. The bowl fell straight down. The chuck kept spinning. I swore.

There’s a deep gouge – no shit, eh? – around the inside of the bowl near the bottom, where the corner is. There’s a crack along the side of the bowl, emanating from where the catch ended because the tenon broke.

I put the bowl on a table and decided that I’d just turn something, without anything of a plan. So, I put another bowl blank on the lathe and got to work.

Fuck me. I just couldn’t get it right. None of my cuts were smooth. I kept digging deeper into the wood, removing nearly an inch off the diameter before I got something nearly round and almost smooth. There’s frayed wood all on the bottom, which I can’t seem to smooth out. One catch, two catch, three catch, four.

I eventually took it off the lathe and got to work on a pen. I started up the lathe and it wasn’t turning. I had forgotten to unlock the headstock spindle – that’s terrible for the motor. When I started turning, the blank kept getting snagged on the chisel. The tailstock wasn’t tightening properly on the lathe bed so it wasn’t keeping pressure against the bushings. Somehow, eventually, in the end, I got a pen out of it.

I have to go back tomorrow to try again.

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