Tony covered a lot of ground during his all day demo so I’m afraid I can only scratch the surface of all of the information he passed on. He managed to fit in five demos for us, a bowl, a scoop, a tray, a mushroom stool and two versions of a money box.
He started with a bowl and wanted to show us how to make the best of a cheaper piece of wood. He had a blank which, despite having lovely grain, had a bit missing and signs of ash bark beetle which limited its potential. He planned to make an ogee bowl with a broad but shallow top narrowing quite quickly to avoid the area of missing wood. But instead of committing himself to that he started carefully, exploring the wood to see what he could do to extract its full potential.
He began, as he did often throughout the day, with a quarter inch bowl gouge. His main reason was that by starting with a smaller tool he was limiting his chance of a bad catch. He was particularly cautious because he was chucking the piece onto a forstner drill hole which was parallel sided and the absence of a dovetail meant he had a less than ideal grip on the piece until he had created a spigot and reversed it into the chuck.
