I apologize to The Vapors. I’m sure they’re going to be very displeased at my use of the title of their 1981 hit single for my pun but seeing that it came off of their album, New Clear Days (Nuclear Days), they should appreciate my clever use of words.

That being said, I am very pleased that more of my pieces are heading to Japan as gifts for some business people visiting here in Charlotte from the Shin-Kobe company in Tokyo, Japan. This is the third set of purchases that were made that will head back to the other side of the world. It’s exciting that some of my pieces get to travel so far.

This is the latest in my teapot series.  I started this at the Charlotte Woodturner’s club during a demonstration on April 17th and finally finished it this past week.  The main body and finial is cherry and the feet and cube is blackwood.  The handle was pieced and carved to be part of the body and the feet are seated below the surface. The carved finial twists up to a setting which holds the blackwood cube at the top.

The piece is approximately 7 inches long, 6 inches tall from foot to finial and about 5 inches wide. It is finished with lacquer and hand buffed.

Thanks for taking a look. Tell me what you think. Comments and Critiques welcome.

American craftsman bungalow style with combined living/sleeping area, spacious outdoor kitchen, nice garden veranda and close to nature bathroom. Fresh paint and new flooring. New construction.

For a number of months now, my father and I have been working on Katherine’s and Charlotte’s playhouse. After many weekends, I finally put the final trim down inside and hopefully other than a few curtain rods, my part is done. Now it’s time for Jenny to add the curtains, put down a rug and figure out what toys we want to move from the kid’s rooms into the cottage.

I had planned on turning the posts but after working all Saturday painting, I decided to change my plans. I’m really pleased with the way it turned out. It has a real arts and craft feel to it and was a lot of fun since I got to spend time with Papa from foundation to shingles.

Here’s a big thank you to Nana and Papa for putting this together. I’m sure that the kids will have a ball in it over the years.

To get the piece out of his truck that is.  This is Anatoly Tsiris’ latest piece that he brought to the Charlotte Woodturner’s club meeting.  It stands a little more than 6′ tall and weighs in at a little more than 100 lbs.

This is what you can do with a custom Nichols lathe. He said that he could have made it one foot longer if the wood had cooperated. He also said that he used two large steady rests to stabilize it while he hollowed it.  Anatoly uses a 10′ 145# boring bar with a articulating tool holder on it. The cutter is a 1 1/4″ square of M2 steel. This particular piece was hollowed from the bottom and the top. It was still a little wet so he puts hose clamps on it to keep the edges and neck from cracking.

Anatoly’s work is amazing and he keeps pushing the limits of his equipment and imagination. I’ve really enjoyed being able to see his work and talk to him about woodturning even if the scale of our pieces are completely different.

Last night I did the demonstration for the Charlotte Woodturner’s club. It was the fourth demo I’ve done for the club. John Benton, the club president, asked me a couple of weeks ago if I would be interested since we didn’t have anyone on the schedule and I said yes. I had a couple of things in mind, one was an alternative blank mounting technique involving a poor mans off center chuck and the other one, which I chose, was to turn a teapot.

Looking back, I think I bit off more than I could chew in an hour and a half demonstration. I thought I had practiced enough to get some smooth transitions from one axis to the next and then do the hollowing but it took a little more time. I also mis-calculated the center of the bowl portion of the teapot and had to make a second adjustment for my tenon. I ended up only hollowing part of the body and finally roughing in the body, spout and handle while a handful of people stood around at the end. I really missed the mark on finishing the piece and I apologize that it took so long.

I’m going to be doing this same demonstration in August at the Waxhaw Woodturner’s club so I’m going back to the drawing board and trying to cut down the time it takes me to turn and shape the piece. I’m also going see about going by Harbor Freight and picking up an air body saw like Trent Bosch uses so I can quickly cut away the excess around the handle instead of doing the cutting by hand with a coping saw. For only $15 it should save a lot of time and give me some breathing room during the demo.

Thank you to those who came last night and thank you for putting up with my first attempt at this demonstration. I appreciate the interest in my work. I’ll be posting the finished product here soon so be on the lookout.

I’ve been invited to do a demonstration for the Charlotte Woodturner’s on April 17th and will be presenting some ideas for turning wooden teapots. The club meets at EcoScape in Fort Mill, SC (map) and welcomes guests who are interested. We usually start with a short business meeting, then have the demonstration, and finish with a show and tell from the club members. Please come out and join us if you have a chance. Email me if you need directions or have any questions.

Handout: The Wooden Teapot

Over the past few weeks I’ve finally gotten around to something that I’ve wanted to do for years. I’ve completely rebuilt OvermanShop.com and made it database driven so all I have to do is take a picture, type a description and other particulars, and wallah, a new piece shows up in my inventory. What’s really cool about the whole process is I actually learned three new web design concepts and tools while I was at it. I built a mySQL database from scratch, I wrote the PHP code to build the HTML pages, and I created a CSS page to handle the design. I’ve never used any of the three other than in a pre-packaged site like this blog.

Hopefully this change will help me keep my current pieces inventoried, prevent confusion about what I have available, provide information about where a piece can be viewed, and make it easier to purchase an item. Take a look and tell me what you think.

The geek in me enjoys running a few websites and is amazed at the advancement of the Internet over the past 15 or so years. I remember sitting in front of a VT-100 terminal with a 19200 baud connection doing FTP and Telnet and chatting with people all over the globe. I remember MUDs and coding LaTeX docs and ray trace graphics on a DEC1000 by hand shortly after NCSU implemented a copy of MIT’s Athena Project in the early 90s. The world wide web was of course in it’s infancy and a blog hadn’t even been invented, much less the major things you can do with HTML, CSS, and the dozens scripting languages of today.

Sorry if my rambling nostalgic has lost you there. I’ll get to the point. I’m turning off the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) on April 9th, 2008 and honoring all of the web designers and really smart people who came up with this stuff. Without them, all you will see is a series of text, pictures, and the unbridled chaos of lots of data jumbled onto a page. Everything won’t be sized perfectly, have nice margins, and generally be in place. So bear with me on the 9th, on the 10th we’ll be back to normal and thanking God that all those smart people have worked so hard.

You can read more about CSS Naked Day here and here.

Friday night I headed down to Lancaster, SC for a gallery crawl that benefited the Lancaster County Council of the Arts.  The crawl included Bob Doster’s Backstreet Gallery and Chastain’s Studio Lofts.  My work was represented at Bob Doster’s gallery and I had the chance to meet and talk to quite a few interesting people including one of my co-workers and his wife, Keith and Mary Grey.  I appreciated all the interest and look forward to visiting with everyone again in May when they have the next crawl.

I also had the chance to meet Savannah Cudd who was showing at Bob’s gallery and see her beautiful and interesting work.  I especially enjoyed a large painting of a cicada, though my wife would freak out if I thought to mention hanging painting of an insect in our house.

During the night I walked down to Chastain’s and met Alan Noll, a sculptor and potter who was working on a piece featuring a mans face. We talked for a few minutes and I let him get back to concentrating on the sculpture while I snapped a few pictures.

The Charlotte Woodturners were lucky to have Joe Ruminski demonstrate this month.  He shared tips on making and using wooden drive spurs, a ball and cup toy, bone rings, and some safety tips before showing us how he makes his artistic saucers. Thanks for sharing with us Joe. I look forward to catching up with you again sometime.