Greetings fellow Woodchucks. I am back from Florida, after, mercifully, a fairly light brush with hurricane Irma. The piles of debris by the curb of every house on our street made it look much worse than it actually was. Virtually no one had any structural damage, but everyone got their trees “pruned”! There were limbs everywhere, but my beautiful 100-year-old live oaks made it through unscathed.

Thanks so much to everyone who pitched back here at home to juggle schedules to allow me to go down to deal with it all. To Janet Collins for swapping demo dates with me, to many others for all the help hosting the meeting, the many contributions to the refreshment table, and finally a big thanks to Craig Hall and Adam Wager for taking care of our booth at the Woodstock show. I am very grateful to you all!

On Wednesday, October 4th, we had our last “Sawdust Session” in Skunk Hollow for this season.  Thanks to all who attended! In addition to the usual woodchuck patter, we spent some time with my new Simon Hope thread cutting jig, a brief review of which will follow here. We also took a look at two new finishing products from England, made expressly for turners, by turners, “Yorkshire Grit” for polishing, and “Hampshire Sheen” for finishing. There are
many Youtube videos on these products, like this one

(https://video.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?fr=yhs-Lkry-F01&hsimp=yhsSF01&hspart=Lkry&p=yorkshire+grit+and+hamp
shire+sheen#id=2&vid=c31fed62b9f01368247cd3e17f7f82e9&action=click) is a brief one, which the URL is not!….Sorry!

Both of these are products of Martin SabanSmith, a well-know British turner and Youtube “celebrity” (http://www.msabansmith.com/). The claim by the manufacturer is that it is the equivalent of sanding to 1000 grit. We tried some on a small hollow form I was cutting the threads on, and it did indeed take the surface to the next level, which I had sanded to 320. We did not have a sample of the “Hampshire Sheen”, but it is a very high quality finishing wax favored by many Brits. Both products are available in this country from this supplier.(http://www.thewalnutlog.com/)

Fellow Woodchuck, Larry Rice, came to our Session this week bearing an incredible trailer load of spalted maple (see photo below ). He has given this to the club with the idea that in exchange for a donation to the club “till” anyone is welcome to some. It will be here for the meeting on the 18th for those interested, or if you can’t make it to the meeting, get in touch with me to arrange another time. As you can see from the photo, there are some very large pieces, for those of you with the lathe capacity to handle them! I will be here until about the 10th of November, then gone until May.

Hope to see many of you at the meeting! It will be the last one in Skunk Hollow this year! I will be doing a multiaxis
demo, and a short demo of the Simon Hope Threading jig. See my review elsewhere in “Chatter”.

Cheers!

Russ Fellows
(skunkmen@gmail.com)
802-343-0393

Last modified: June 10, 2018