Sheffield's floods help make medieval bowls

The floods in Sheffield last year have lead to the environment agency looking at the management of riverside trees along the river Don. One of the problems was that fallen trees washed downstream and blocked bridges creating dams. Now there is a program of cutting the riverside trees, many of which are alder a timber which has little commercial value today but which was one of the most commonly used timbers for bowls in medieval and saxon/viking times.

I make a lot of replicas of medieval and viking bowls to sell to historical re-enactors as well as museums and the biggest market of the year where they all go to source new kit is in 3 weeks time at Coventry. Any bowls I turn this week I can just about get dried and finished for the market so I collected some of the freshly felled Alder yesterday and started working it today. Here is a trailer load of alder poles, the orange/red colour is caused by the sap oxidising, when freshly cut the wood is white but minutes later it stains this colour.

The most common shape of vessel in the medieval period was a simple deep bowl, 6-8" diameter like this one excavated in London.

And here are some of the replicas I turned today, one of the nice things about having sourced this small diameter wood is that they will warp in a very pleasant way as they dry, they will dip down at the sides and go slightly oval giving them a sort of boat shaped profile, just like the originals.

Freezing in the workshop and turning star bowls

It was -12 at home last night and it was well below freezing all day today in the workshop. I am sometimes asked how I manage to work in an unheated workshop all winter but to be honest once I am peddling the lathe I do keep warm. The one thing that is a problem is the hands, I can't wear gloves as I need to constantly feel the bowl to check the thickness and finish and as I am always changing from one tool to another they never warm up. Bare hands on cold steel is not nice, though I love the clear frosty weather.

Last week I finished turning my porringer blanks and cut up another disc of beech. This gave me about 50 blanks, some more porringers and star bowls. These are copies of a 15th century design, I was first asked to do a copy by a historical re-enactor 7 or 8 years ago and since then they have been one of my most popular designs particularly as a wedding gift. I particularly like doing them when demonstrating to the public as I turn them on the lathe then carve the scallops with an axe before smoothing them with a sharp knife. Few people realise that an axe can be a precision tool when used with skill. I am really pleased with the markings in the beech when finished and oiled these will be beautiful bowls.


When I made my first one of these I marked the scallops out evenly with dividers and it ended up looking like a piece of engineering, just too regular. Now I just start cutting as accurately as I can by eye, the scallops vary by just the right amount to be pleasing.

I posted off an interesting parcel yesterday containing these bowls.


These are for a small theatre company "Vocal Motions" and this is why they want them.

"Our forthcoming production, The Magdalene Mysteries, will embark on an epic journey across the historical depictions of Mary Magdalene, through text, vocal music, contemporary dance. It will be staged in different venues in London, including a site-specific version at St. James Church in Piccadilly. It will then tour to the Brighton Fringe Festival and to Rome.
Key in our production is the use of twelve small bowls and one large one to represent Jesus and the disciples. These will be incorporated in the choreography at different stages in the play."

As always with theatre companies they were on a tight budget and deadline but because I liked the idea I have sent these on loan for free. More details of their production here.

http://www.elastictheatre.com/?page_id=11

more sharp tools and meeting a knifemaker

Well I had partial success and partial failure with my new turning hooks. I have used them heavily for several days now and 3 have broken, the tips have snapped off. Close inspection showed the grain structure was fine so there are three things I can work on for the next batch. Make the whole tool a little softer by raising the tempering temperature, leave the edge at the same hardness but try to get a little more heat into the back of the hook so it has a hard edge supported by a tougher back or make them with a slightly thicker back.

Out of the tools that worked however I have a couple of really good tools and one of those that lost just the end of its tip is also still working very well. That tool is a completely new design for the fine finishing of the inside of the bowl and has definitely improved the quality of the bowls I made this week so I feel I am making progress. I can very easily make strong tools that would work well enough but I have a lot of those already, what I am after is making harder, thiner tools that cut more efficiently and hold a sharper edge for longer, the only way to find out what the hardest, thinnest edge is that will work is by pushing the boundaries until they break then backing off a little.

On Thursday I treated myself by visiting Mik Hodgkinson an inspirational knife-maker in Birmingham. I have been using a knife-makers internet forum www.britishblades.com to learn more about toolmaking and had seen Mik's work there, his knives are truly works of art but functional art. They are very much made in the Scandinavian tradition and when we have traveled in Sweden we have seen that it is commonplace for folk to have beautiful handmade knives which they use for everything from slicing bread and cheese to whittling spoons or pointing a stick to toast sausages over a campfire. Children are taught to use knives as tools from a young age, I never heard of "knife crime" there but it would be interesting to see comparative statistics. Here are our children learning from master carver Wille Sundqvist in 2003.

So on thursday I went to see Mik and his knives and bought two of them. Mik has a wonderful eye for balancing the blade and handle and creating sweet lines to the knife. These two are made with blades from two different Smiths, Poul Strand from Norway and Mattias Styrefors from Sweden. The handles are made from 10,000 year old mamoth bone and mamoth ivory, this becomes available ocasionally as glaciers in Siberia melt and the frozen mamoths are released. I adore Mik's work and that of these talented smiths and it will be a joy to use these tools when I am carving my spoons and poringers.

forging turning tools

Today I did some more work on the tools I rough forged on the bladesmithing course. I ground them and polished them then put them in my little "furnace" which is a rather grand name for a pile of firebricks and a blowtorch.


Each one was heated then the small hook formed on the end, larger ones I form with hammer and anvil and smaller ones with a pair of needle nose pliers. When the metal is up to temperature it bends quite easily though I have to work quickly the metal is thin so cools fast and when it comes out of the furnace I maybe have 5 seconds before it is too cool, if I cary on working it I risk it cracking. I try to form a hook in two or three heats. If it doesn't work in a few heats it is rarely succesful trying to fiddle with the shape of a hook, they tend to end with kinks in the curved profile and do not work satisfactorily.


One thing I learned from Owens bladesmithing course was the importance of "normalising" the tool after forging, this gives the finished tool a less course grain structure and more toughness so its less likely to break. This old file shows the results of normalising, the top piece was not normalised the centre and lower ones were.


As I worked my tools today I realised that during the process of shaping the hooks I am also normalising the metal, that is I am heating it just to the point it changes its grain structure and then cooling it so all that needs to be done afterwards is hardening and tempering. I heat it again and quench it quickly, this gibes me a very hard but brittle tool. It would not get blunt but could easily crack so I have to temper it by heating it to around 240 degrees, in fact as I type this they are heating in the oven.


This is the first time I have tried tempering this way, before I used to heat the tools with a gas torch and watch for characteristic tempering colours which relate to the degree of hardness, it was probably a slightly less controllable process and certainly what I am doing today is easily repeatable if the tools work well.
Well here are the results, the top two are perhaps a little darker and therefore a little softer than I would have aimed for and the next 4 may be a little on the hard side, bottom one looks perfect. The only real way to find out though is to put handles on and work with them for a while, too hard and they will break if they hit a knot, too soft and I'll have to sharpen more often. In the past I have never taken photos at this stage so hopefully this will help me refer back when in a couple of months time I find that one of these tools is a really good one I will be able to see what colour it was tempered to.

bladesmithing

Last weekend I went to Kent on an intensive bladesmithing course with master smith Owen Bush. I have been forging my own woodturning tools for 15 years but everything I do has been learned by trial and error and I wanted to see if I could improve the quality of my tools so that they stay sharper for longer. It was a thoroughly enjoyable weekend and I learned a lot. It was also interesting to watch someone else teaching a craft course. We are always looking to improve the quality of our spooncarving courses and we pick up tips wherever we can.




Nicola came too and did some video which is now on youtube here




and a longer video of the course here