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In this issue I will discuss piercing, a great way to embellish your work, using our dental kit. It may look complicated but it's fun and relaxing, and with a little practice, you can produce some truly beautiful work.
Brian has completed his demos at "TurnFest" (www.turnfest.com.au ) in Australia, and and will begin making his way back to Canada in the next week or so. It will be great to have him back safe and sound.
Many of you have been asking if we will be in San Jose at the AAW Symposium in June. Yes, we will be there. Brian and I will again have a booth on the trade floor where we will have live demos. Brian will also be presenting as one of this year's demonstrators. ( http://www.woodturner.org/sym/sym2012 )
Brian will also be demonstrating at the Utah Woodturning Symposium in Provo, Utah in May, and we will both be attending this great event. ( http://www.utahwoodturning.com )
As Brian will is still away until the beginning of April, please contact me if you have any questions or comments and I will do my best to help you.
Email: gord@langercraftworks.com |
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Missed one of our old newsletters?
Click on the link below to access our archive home page:
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Piercing: A Great Way to Embellish Your Work
by Gord Langer
If you are looking to have some fun and want to embellish some of your pieces, why not try piercing? Where we live, the local wood species that we use on a regular basis are birch and maple. Both are great to turn but don't have a lot of figure, so to enhance our work we like to pierce our pieces.
You are only limited by your imagination as the techniques I will discuss in this article can be used for many forms, including bowls and vases.
 It takes a little practice. Use a piece of work that you have turned very thin, say 3/16", before sanding; once the sanding is complete a little thinner is better. The thinner your piece is, the easier it is to pierce. We like to use our dental handpiece for piercing and while we have pencil grip tools as well, both Brian and I feel that the dental handpiece is the most comfortable, especially for long piercing sessions.
As I indicated, a little practice is a good thing and as I hadn't done much piercing for a while, I decided to start on a small piece first just to get comfortable. I will show you two pieces and how I went about piercing them. I hope you will give it a try as it really is fun and I find it very relaxing once I tune out the noise of the dental drill and disassociate myself from the dentist's chair! |
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Here, on the left, I show you how I have my dental kit set up.
I had an old Craftsman drill toolbox that I modified to hold my dental kit set up. This allows me to easily store and transport my piercing equipment.
John Cobb (www.treenshop.com), one of our readers who purchased our dental kit, sent us a picture of his set up, which is shown on the right. |
 Once you have your equipment set up, there are a few essentials you need to consider before you start your piercing project. Be sure you are comfortable, have good light, have a good and comfortable set of magnifiers and good ventilation. I use a small fan to blow the smoke generated away from me. This works great for me but a filter system would be even better. The magnifiers I use are shown here on the right. They are lightweight and comfortable and are available from: www.telesightmagnifiers.com . |
 Once you have chosen the vessel that you wish to pierce, start with doing a layout, and using a pencil, trace or draw your piercing pattern on your vessel. On my practice piece I chose to use a maple leaf as my basic pattern. Once I laid out the outer edge of the maple leaf on the vase, I drew out the interior of the maple leaf. (Here you can also see my little fan.) |
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Now it's time to set up your piercing tool and start having fun. Here you can see I am comfortable, using good light and magnification.
The dental handpiece requires regular lubrication. Here you can see that I add a drop of oil into the smaller of the two holes on the dental handpiece. I usually lubricate every hour or so and let the unit run for a few minutes to blow out the excess oil from the handpiece. This timing coincidentally works great for me as I usually like to take a few minute break every hour or so. |
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Once the interior part of the maple leaves have been pierced I then move to the exterior of the leaves. I am careful to leave small tabs so not to cut out the large pieces of the vessel, and to allow more structural integrity. These tabs will be removed during the final piercing process. Before cutting these tabs I take the opportunity to sand both the inside and outside of the vessel to remove some of the 'fuzz' that remains after piercing the piece. |
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Once a light sanding is complete I cut the small tabs that remain and that hold the large pieces in place. Here you see the large pieces being removed, along with the finished piece. |
After a little practice, I picked a vessel Brian made for me that I was saving for a special project. For a complete review on how to turn a vessel such as this refer to our archive articles: Issue #4 and #23a. |
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To help me begin my pattern, I turned to my lathe and with my indexing feature, I created some reference lines to help me lay out the pattern for this piece. |
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I chose a butterfly pattern for this piece. On the computer, I drew up several sizes of a simple butterfly and then cut the pattern out on some mylar (clear plastic film). I used my laser cutter to cut out the pattern from the mylar, but this could easily be done with heavy paper and scissors or X-Acto knives. As with the practice project, I started by drawing the exterior part of the butterfly and then drew the interior of the butterfly. These lines are what I will follow when starting to pierce the piece. |
Here I start the piercing process. Again, be sure you are comfortable and have good support for your hand as this will give you a much better result than trying to do this while in an uncomfortable position. Be sure you have good support for your arm and have good light.
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Here you can see the piece progressing and with the interior of the butterflies complete, I now start on the exterior part of the butterflies as I did with the maple leaf piece above. |
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Here is a close up of the cut out tabs that I leave in place to provide the structural integrity while doing the final sanding. |
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With this piece I returned to the lathe and mounted it on a chuck. This allowed me to easily lightly sand the interior and the exterior of the piece.
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As before, I then cut the cut out tabs to remove the larger pieces.
With this piece, I also cut out the top rim of the vessel to create a more open look.
Once all the tabs are cut, it's time for some detail sanding of the wood that was adjacent to the cut out pieces. |
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Here you see the piercing complete and ready for finish. It will look great with just some lacquer but I am planning to add some color. I will use my airburush to paint the maple leaves in some fall colors, and to make the butterflies "pop" with lots of color.
I will show you the painted pieces in a future newsletter.
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With some practice and good equipment I was able to produce some pieces I am quite proud of. On the left are two of my pieces that were done as described above, using the dental handpiece.
The piece replicating flames drew a lot of attention at the craft shows I was in last fall. A picture of it was featured on the promotional shopping bags produced by the craftshow organizers. |
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For some additional inspiration here are some of Brian's pierced pieces.
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To see the piercing processes in "live" detail, check out our Embellishment DVD. In this 4+ hour 2 DVD set we show four projects from start to finish.
We feature piercing, woodburning, airbrushing and texturing.
These DVDs are available at:
I hope this inspires you to give piercing a try. It will expand your variety of pieces and certainly provide the "WOW" factor for your friends and customers. |
This is the ultimate tool kit for piercing your work. These pneumatic piercing systems are comfortable to use, the lightweight design and the 400,000 r.p.m. speed are ideal to embellish your work. The handpiece design allows for unwavering control of your cut. The carbide dental burs seem to last forever but when the need arises, take only seconds to replace.
The kit includes the handpiece kit, ball valve assembly, regulator, filter, hoses, aerosol oil, male and female quick connects, two burs.
Available for immediate shipping at:
or
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Check out this link on You Tube on how to use our Elio Drives.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQQI_Zr7bC8
I would also like to thank one of our readers who noticed that I used the words "mortise taper" instead of "*Morse taper" in the YouTube video; clearly my woodworking background came through. Our Elio Drives have a #2 morse taper.
*The "Morse Taper" was invented by Stephen A. Morse in the mid-1860's. Since then it has evolved to encompass smaller and larger sizes.
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Now available in three sizes and are black zinc coated.
 Available for immediate shipping at:or
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 Available for immediate shipping at:or
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Two Piece Hollow Form DVD
Over 70 minutes of instructional footage.
Amateurs and professionals alike will learn Brian McEvoy's secrets to producing beautiful works of art using only basic woodturning tools. Once you have mastered the two piece hollow form, you can let your imagination run wild and use this simple technique to turn out museum quality work.
Our Price: $29.99 + Shipping |
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Embellish your work
This 2 DVD set has over
4 hours of instruction and covers 4 projects from start to finish.
The techniques covered in these 2 DVDs include: Woodburning, Piercing, Airbrushing & Texturing, a great value.
Our Price: $44.99 + Shipping
Preview our DVDs
You can preview our DVDs on YouTube or at:
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Deep Vessel Boring DVD
Over 90 minutes of instructional footage plus 20 minutes of bonus features.
Join master woodturner Brian McEvoy who will show the process from raw wood to sanded piece in easy to follow steps. Create amazing pieces quickly with these never-before-seen secrets from a master woodturner.
Our Price: $29.99 + Shipping |
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