Hokie – ME take a bunch of photos of every step along the way? Unheard of! ;) Actually, I have been a little lax lately. Thanks for the heads up on how much they’ll change. I may just have to give that color combo a shot. I’m both eager and apprehensive to try segmented bowls. The eager bit is about how pretty they can be. The hesitation comes from how much extra work is involved to build up the blank from which to make the turning.
Alistair – I totally agree. That’s one reason I really love The Hobbit House website. He posts dozens of photos of each tree, and color-corrects most of them, alerting you to which ones he’s worked on that way, and which he’s posted without correction, or which he couldn’t correct beyond a certain point, complete with descriptions as to how the real wood appears in relation to what he’s posted (e.g. “it’s not quite this red in real life, and a bit deeper in color.”)
reggie – One of the things that’s been most amazing to me is how very much wood actually does smell! I’ve become really aware of it, and now they’re all remarkably fragrant when I’m working with them in the woodshop. Eucaylptus has had a lemon smell that was so strong and so sweet, like lemon candy, that I actually gleeked once while smelling a fresh cut! Some Douglas fir I’ve gotten from Home Depot – green and kiln dried – has smelled remarkably like both warm pumpkins and fresh lemons, sometimes like both at once. Jacaranda is almost exactly like fresh potato peels, and after an hour of turning and sweating, I threw the shirt in the hamper later and it still reeked of that raw potato smell. Walnut to me, especially if your saw is dull and burns it while cutting it smells very much like chocolate bread pudding w/ cinnamon to me. I salivate while cutting it :) I really love the normal scent of walnut, too, and never having worked in it, a couple years back I bought my first board, and the smell took me back to a friend’s basement lounge/game room. I recalled that the walls were all paneled in dark wood, and realized the room had smelled strongly of walnut wood. The smell itself gives me happy, nostalgic feelings of playing Atari on a shag carpeted basement floor, and I’d really like to panel my own basement game room some day in that smell (need a basement first). I planed some dry red oak and smelled the fresh shavings, and it stung my eyes, kinda like I got glass cleaner spritzed in them. It has a very sharp, stinging smell, not unlike that of ammonia, though distinct and quite different in actual fragrance. There was a scrap board of something very light, and looking a bit like something halfway between pine and cedar that I picked up with some other free boards in an alley once. I planed the edge, and was immediately brought back in time to my gradeschool days. It took me a minute to figure it out, but it was ‘old penicls.’ I looked it up, and found out there are species of cedar and juniper that are collectively called ‘pencil cedar,’ and are, or were what pencils are made of. I haven’t smelled it in ages, so they must have switched species, at least primarily, but it was very distinct and specific. I passed a bag of shavings around at work, and everyone had similar memories of school days. Paperbark (Melaleuca quinquenervia), upon first cutting into it, had the same salty, musky smell of aquariums I’ve been to, especially shark exhibits, and the petting tank areas. Again, more flashbacks. It goes on and on like this. Dozens more species. I didn’t really think of knotty pine as being very scented, but cutting some up more than a decade later, I had powerful flashbacks to my fledgling carpentry days in my folks’ barn. I used only knotty pine back then. It’s become almost a fetish for me now. I want to saw open, plane, and sand every kind of wood now, and a big part of it is scent-curiosity.
-- Gary, Los Angeles, video game animator
