I bought my first bowl gouge last week and I finally got a chance to put a handle on it. It is a 1/2" Thompson V shaped bowl gouge. I don't have much experience with lathes or lathe tools so take all of this with a grain of salt or too.
Shipping was great. It arrived before I expected it. And it was packaged quite well.
However I was quite surprised it had some surface rust on it. A little rubbing with WD-40 got most of it off.
The tang was just about dead on .5".
I took a scrap piece of walnut and turned a handle for it:
As you can see I didn't do a great job on cutting the copper pipe for the ferule to the right length but I think it is functional:
I was a little surprised at the grind it had from Thompson tools. Reading their site it sounds like they use a wolverine grinding jig so I expected the wings to be swept back more. But I don't know anything so I made a jig to copy the grind:
My tool rest is a little lower than a wolverine would be (mine is ~6.5 " or so?) so I could not directly copy the dimensions. Therefore I cut the dowel long to start with and progressively shortened it until rotating the gouge in the jig appeared to copy the original grind.
Here is the grind I have now:
This wing is a little higher and I still need to figure out what went wrong:
The gouge seems to cut well and I used it to hollow out a bowl that Bob (woodArtz) gave me. I did not notice any decrease in sharpness through the bowl. But I did end up with more tear out then I would have expected. It doesn't look terrible but after quite a bit of sanding on the lathe it has not gone away. As this is my first bowl I am not sure if this is expected, my sharpening was poor or my technique was poor (maybe a little of all three)
. I will post a separate thread with some pictures of my first attempts .
Thanks for all the help I have received!
Salem
Shipping was great. It arrived before I expected it. And it was packaged quite well.
However I was quite surprised it had some surface rust on it. A little rubbing with WD-40 got most of it off.
The tang was just about dead on .5".
I took a scrap piece of walnut and turned a handle for it:
As you can see I didn't do a great job on cutting the copper pipe for the ferule to the right length but I think it is functional:
I was a little surprised at the grind it had from Thompson tools. Reading their site it sounds like they use a wolverine grinding jig so I expected the wings to be swept back more. But I don't know anything so I made a jig to copy the grind:
My tool rest is a little lower than a wolverine would be (mine is ~6.5 " or so?) so I could not directly copy the dimensions. Therefore I cut the dowel long to start with and progressively shortened it until rotating the gouge in the jig appeared to copy the original grind.
Here is the grind I have now:
This wing is a little higher and I still need to figure out what went wrong:
The gouge seems to cut well and I used it to hollow out a bowl that Bob (woodArtz) gave me. I did not notice any decrease in sharpness through the bowl. But I did end up with more tear out then I would have expected. It doesn't look terrible but after quite a bit of sanding on the lathe it has not gone away. As this is my first bowl I am not sure if this is expected, my sharpening was poor or my technique was poor (maybe a little of all three)
. I will post a separate thread with some pictures of my first attempts .Thanks for all the help I have received!
Salem
