It's always irritating to have a failure, but then there's typically more to learn from getting things wrong.
Today I went out and sourced some Horse Chestnut from a group of trees I had seen before and thought would have plenty of dead, dry and standing to collect. As it happened there was not a huge amount - just about everything was green, but there was enough to collect for a set.
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| Poor image of some fat sticky buds |
In my selected wood I could see that pith might be an issue so I collected a larger piece with the idea of carving my spindle with the pith off centre. Good idea I reckon but ultimately poorly executed as the pith needed to be even more off centre or indeed carved out entirely (which would have meant getting a larger piece of wood).
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| Pith off centre but not enough |
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| The bottom end view |
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| The top end view |
I started to burn in the set, and immediately I could tell that my base board was probably too hard. I got a nice little shiny circle. I roughed it up, hoping to salvage the set and tried again with a bit more pressure. The top of the spindle collapsed and it shot out of the bow.
I reshaped the top and tried a few more times with basically the same results, and also managed to cut my finger on one of the times the top of the spindle collapsed.
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| Pith causing the top of the spindle to collapse |
In the final image below, you can see the problem with the hard hearth - my spindle end is very flat, and to make matters worse the bowl is very close to the right hand edge in this photo. If my spindle was not collapsing then I may have been able to get it working, but it would have been touch and go.
Lessons:
- If there is a pith problem carve it well away from centre, or out completely
- Check the hardness of the hearth
- Be very careful not to have the bowl too close to an edge - a wider area of hearth may help with this
