Carbide turning tools

[robo hippy]

Kind of brings up an article in an aviation magazine I saw while waiting in the dentist office. It was about an engineering firm and the type of engineer they were looking for. The picture showed a man standing with 30 or so model planes around him of all sorts of different designs. The point of the article was that they were looking for people who had made models, had them fail, then rebuilt them again and again. People who would take mistakes and fix them, learning from the experience. If you have ever built planes, there are only two kinds, those that have crashed and those that are going to crash.

robo hippy

 

[Bill Boehme]

... or, when I started flying retractable gear aircraft, the saying was that there are two kinds of retractable gear pilots: those who have made a wheels-up landing and those who will.

 

[Richard Avram]

I have a couple of good dings in the ceiling above my lathe. I'm not sure if the landing gear was up or down but the landing sure wasn't pretty. On the subject of being in a club and mentoring, it works for me but I also think you have to approach it with some individualism. For somebody like me who didn't know the first thing about different grinds or riding the bevel it was like a huge jump out of the gate. But, we have a lot of members in that group and some of them are VERY good turners but I don't think any two turn exactly alike. I think that maybe even a bigger benefit than mentoring is the show and tell table where you can see the level that others are rising to and you can get some constructive criticism of your own work.

 

[Bill Boehme]

... I think that maybe even a bigger benefit than mentoring is the show and tell table where you can see the level that others are rising to and you can get some constructive criticism of your own work.

That is a very good point. At our club meetings, we have four tables for turnings -- one for display only, one for critique, one for Empty Bowls, and one for Bring-Back. The critiques at our club are somewhat geared to the skill demonstrated by the turner, but in all cases are meant to encourage and not anything like what you might see at a juried event. It was a great benefit to me to be able to see what others were doing and figure out what it was that gave various turnings more eye-appeal than others.