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preparing-green-wood-for-turning-rate My concern is am I attracting termites by doing so? The moisture must be allowed to escape the pile. This is especially true for for preparing green wood for turning rate grain bowls and vase forms. By using our site, you agree to our cookie policy. If there is checking on an old unsealed end, make a fresh crosscut to expose an unchecked surface; seal it immediately.

It is most important when cutting wet or green wood with a band saw that the blade be a 3 or 4 Tooth Per Inch skip tooth blade. A hooked tooth blade does not shed wet sawdust as well as a skip tooth, so build up on the blade becomes a problem, in fact downright dangerous. Remember to always allow the blade to do the cutting. Never force the wood into the blade; let it feed itself.

If you have to force the wood into the blade to make it cut, it is time to change the blade or sharpen it. A word here about selecting bowl blank locations in the log. I have found that it makes little difference whether I mount the face plate on the heartwood side of the blank or on the sapwood or new growth side of the blank.

At least it does not matter to me. The rocking foot can be cured quickly and efficiently with a belt sander. The oval shape to which a bowl dries makes a good story as to how you were able to turn the bowl that way. There is plenty of room here for distortions of the truth, and it can really be fun; some of that hocus pocus mentioned before.

Layout For 4 Natural Edged Bowls. That is where the brightest colors are located, and the subsequent movement during the drying process really adds mystery to the piece. Now that you have cut your turning blanks, it is probably a good idea to find a place where they can be stored until you have time to turn them.

The best location is on the side of a Preparing Green Wood For Turning Screen building that is constantly in the shade. If you do not have such a location, an open shed or a tarp will suffice. You want to minimize contact with direct sunlight as much as possible. It also helps to keep the area moist. There are several products you can use to help seal the ends of the turning blanks, as well as all surface areas. A product called green wood sealer, which is a wax and oil emulsion, works really well.

If you do not have access to this, old oil paints or canning wax work reasonably well. Whatever you do, do not wrap the blanks in plastic bags. This traps moisture in without allowing the wood to breathe, and sets up the perfect brewery for bacteria and fungi. If you are unlucky enough to open the bag a couple of weeks later, especially if the weather has been hot, I guarantee that you will never use plastic bags again. The odor permeates the wood and it never goes away.

There is one exception to this rule. If you live in the desert, using plastic bags for short periods of time is perhaps one of the only ways you can prevent checking. Now if you want the wood to spalt, ie have bacteria work wonderful color changes in the wood, set one end of the log on soil. Different species react to different molds and the resulting colors are different.

It usually takes a couple of months, but the wait is usually well worth it. If you forget that you have done this and leave the log too long the spalting process is also called dry rot , the end result will be dry rot and a useless piece of wood.

Leave the logs whole and work off one end. Keep the ends of the log sealed as described above. Cutting as you need to will extend the life of the log until you are ready to start turning, within reason, that is. Weather conditions play a crucial role here. Hot dry conditions will cause logs to check more rapidly than wet or moist conditions. When cutting logs to length so that they are more manageable, make sure that you cut them at least 6 inches longer than the diameter.

This is to ensure that if checking occurs, there is still enough wood left to utilize the full diameter of the log. Now that we have our bowl blank cut and ready for turning, it is time to mount it onto the lathe. There are many methods available to accomplish this. The first is that there has to be a tenon turned for the jaws to grab onto. The size of this tenon is in proportion to the size of the bowl you want to turn.

This requires turning the blank between centers first. Now depending on the size of the blank and the speed of your lathe, this can be done, however it is Preparing Green Wood For Turning Data an extra step, and can be a bit intimidating because most spindle lathes run fast and have a short swing.

The other problem is that most green wood is fairly soft, and the tenon will most likely become severely crushed when the jaws are tightened. This is a safety limitation because a crushed tenon cannot hold the turning blank securely. The same limitations apply to expansion chucks.

A fastening recess has to be turned or drilled into the bottom of the blank before it can be mounted on the chuck. The softness of green wood makes it susceptible to crushing when the jaws are expanded. This crushing severely limits the holding effectiveness of the expansion chuck.

Additionally, since most chucks have the same jaw set up, bowl bottoms are all the same, disproportional sizes for larger and smaller bowls. Fastening points should be in proportion to the size of the bowl. Screw chucks offer a viable alternative to the use of the above devices. Jerry Glaser manufactures a screw chuck as well as the finest wood turning gouges in the world , with a sharp threaded screw that bites into the wood holding it securely.

It also allows you to take the wood off the chuck, and put it back on, chasing the same threads. One requirement of this chuck is that the blank must have a flat surface so that the blank can snug up against the flanges of the chuck. Remember also that green wood is much weaker than dried wood, and the blank can pull out of the threads if aggressively turned. The best and safest attachment device, at least in my opinion, is the face plate.

Photo 11 Face Plate Attachment. There should be at least 6 screw holes large enough to accommodate 10 screws. Most of mine are about 2. This allows the screws to apply pressure evenly against the wood, and prevents the work piece from wobbling on the face plate. It is not in the purview of this article to discuss in depth turning techniques.

What we will discuss are the parameters required to successfully turn green wood. Mount the bowl blank onto the lathe. I always slide the tailstock up against the bowl blank in the preliminary roughing steps. This gives more security and assures that when the hardest cuts are being made, the blank is trapped between the headstock and tailstocks. Bowl gouges are a must here because they cut and slice the wood. Scrapers tend to cause tear out.

During this phase of roughing out, examine the wood carefully for any checks or cracking. It is imperative that any checks be turned completely out. If they are not they will cause the bowl to crack. Small cracks or checks just continue to grow, so they must be turned out. Once the outside has been shaped, remove the tailstock and begin the hollowing out process. This is where the techniques mentioned in the beginning paragraph of this article are applied. Keep moving toward the rim making the same depth of cut.

Photo 14 The Second Step. Proceed as before. Do not hollow out the bowl and then try to cut the walls thin, there is not enough rigidity to the wall to allow cutting. It will end in disaster because there is no longer enough wood to support cutting.

This is especially true for for end grain bowls and vase forms. It can be a skosh more or less. There will be no time for a coffee break at this stage. Photos and Illustrations. Moisture content plays an important role as well. Dryer wood can be turned a little thicker. It is most important that whatever the wall thickness , it must be consistent throughout the bowl. Not just the walls, but the bottom must maintain this thickness, as well. This consistency of wall and bottom thickness assures that as the bowl dries, it will do so evenly.

Success depends on this consistency. What is left is thin enough so that the forces created during the drying process are dramatically relieved. That is, the wood is free to move and to relieve stress rather than relieving the stress by cracking.

After the turning is complete, allow the surface of the bowl to air dry before sanding. Keep the bowl on the face plate for day or so, or until the surface is dry enough to sand. In hot dry weather you may only need a couple of hours. You can wet sand, and that is a good technique, however it adds to the drying time.

You can also flash dry a wet bowl with a propane torch. When applying this technique, do not loiter in one place too long. The purpose is to flash the surface moisture off, not to dry the bowl. Too much heat will crack the bowl. This procedure takes a lot of time and propane is not cheap. The same thing can be said about sanding. Applying too much pressure while sanding in one place too long can cause cracking because of heat buildup.

High speed is another culprit, slower speeds for sanding are preferred. After sanding is complete, usually up through grit sandpaper, mark the center of the bowl through the face plate hole and jam or reverse turn the screw holes out of the foot of the bowl.

You can also turn off the bowl with a parting tool. It is important that this dimension, the bottom thickness, be the same as the wall thickness. Now for the tricks mentioned in the first paragraph. The first is not to sand the bottom where you have just turned out the screw holes. Power Sanding is there any other kind? This alone is enough to cause cracking. Wait until the bowl is dry to complete this task.

The second is to place the wet bowl into three brown supermarket paper grocery bags, one inside the other, and wrap them tightly. I use three because the weather here Southern California can change dramatically from humid to very dry in a matter of hours. In areas where the humidity is consistently high and tends to stay that way, three bags may be overkill, but it is always better to be safe than sorry, especially now that the bowl is finished.

Do not use plastic bags. Leave the bowl in your workshop, in your garage, or any environment that maintains a steady humidity and temperature. An air conditioned or heated room is not a good idea.

Check the bags periodically. When the bags are dry the bowl is dry. This usually takes anywhere from 1 or 2 days to 3 weeks depending on the moisture content of the wood, the ambient humidity and temperature, and the species.

Wood generally air dries at about an inch per year. Brown paper bags allow moisture to migrate from the bowl to the outside very slowly. When there is little or no moisture left in the bowl, the bags will be dry. If you live in the desert try 4 or even 5 bags.

During the drying process, those mysterious events take place inside the brown paper bags. Another drying technique is to nuke the bowl in a microwave oven. This technique is not very efficient because a microwave was not designed to vent moisture, but rather to keep it in. So the trick is to nuke the bowl and take it out of the oven Wear gloves. The bowl gets really hot. Keep doing this until the bowl loses most of its moisture. The idea here is not to leave it in for a long period of time, otherwise you will char the wood.

Short bursts of a minute or so will do the trick. I find this to be time consuming, as it requires too many trips back and forth to the microwave oven. The same thing can be accomplished using paper bags without any of the effort.

What is really neat about microwave heating, though, is the steam bending potential of a soaking wet bowl. You can really do some neat stuff. If the walls are thin enough, you can bend the sides towards each other, like a pitcher.

Just try to explain how you turned the bowl that way. I have had a lot of fun doing so. This is risky because it does not remove enough mass, and checking and cracking may occur.

Furthermore, the process takes too long. Their reasoning is that the bowls maintain their shape, i. How boring. My experience has been that they still move. Not as much perhaps, but the final product is still not perfectly round. This procedure generally precludes the possibility of turning natural edge bowls with the bark attached. This fact sheet will provide the basics of how to make a new vegetable garden, starting with site selection, and then covering soil testing, preparing the ground, cover cropping, and making a plan for fertilizing, weeding, and irrigating your new garden.

Choose your garden format. Raised-bed gardens use elevated frames that define a small, manageable space for the garden. While they involve more up-front labor and expense, they work well when the existing soil is not suitable for gardening. In-ground gardens work well when the soil is suitable for a garden, are less expensive to get started, and are easily moved to another location if needed.

The rest of this fact sheet focuses on getting started with in-ground gardens. Test the soil. Vegetable crops grow best in soils with a pH of 6. Our native NH soils are usually much more acidic than this 4. Lime works slowly, so should be applied in the fall if possible. Wood ash acts more quickly, and can be applied in the spring before planting.

If the garden site is still grass, you can apply the lime or wood ash on top of the grass. If your garden site is already tilled and prepared, incorporating or mixing the lime or wood ash into the top inches of soil will help it work sooner.

We recommend that gardeners test their soil at least six months before planting to determine the amount of lime needed. Soil testing can be done through a number of private and public labs. UNH Cooperative Extension offers this service. Prepare the ground for planting. Most new vegetable gardens start out as lawns or a combination of perennial weeds that need to be removed.

Two easy and effective ways to kill perennial weeds in a garden setting are tillage and mulching, or a combination of these. Regardless of the method you use, perennial grasses are most easily killed in the very early spring before they begin to grow, or immediately after they have been mowed very short.

Ideally, it is best to start this process the summer before you want to plant the garden, because it takes time to kill the grass and weeds. In addition, there are insect pests e.

One year without sod will greatly reduce the numbers of these pests. However, if you are willing to take the risk of loss to these pests and battle the weeds, it is possible to prepare the soil the year you want to plant, as long as you start early: before the grass begins to grow.

It is possible to physically kill perennial weeds by hand or using various pieces of equipment. A spade or shovel can be used to prepare a small garden plot by hand using the double-digging or French intensive method — which is laborious and time-consuming, but effective. If you or a neighbor have access to a tractor and tractor-mounted equipment, using a plow first, and then a harrow or rototiller, can prepare a new garden site quickly.

A small walk-behind rototiller can be used instead, but it will almost certainly require repeated uses perhaps 3 times, once every weeks to thoroughly kill perennial weeds.

The principle behind mulching to kill weeds is that you are starving them by preventing access to light. In general, perennial weeds and grasses have extensive root systems and a good supply of energy with which to try to re-grow — so successful mulching requires a mulch that completely blocks light, and it needs to be in place for several weeks or months.

Mulching can be very easily done using a heavy 6-mil or heavier piece of black plastic, weighted down along the edges with heavy rocks or sandbags. As long as the plastic is UV-stabilized, it can be used repeatedly for the same or other purposes. You can also use any of a number of organic materials, such as newspaper, leaves, straw, wood chips, etc.

To be successful, the layer must be thick enough to completely prevent light from reaching the plants growing underneath. Avoid using glossy papers and papers printed with colored inks. Wetting these mulching materials as they are put in place can help make a cohesive layer that is less likely to blow away in the wind. Before removing the mulch, make sure that the sod underneath has been completely killed.

Once the mulch has done the job, it can be left in place, with plants planted through it to reach the soil below, or it can be removed. Cover the ground — protect the soil.

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