Minutes for October 15, 2013 meeting
of the Tennessee Valley Woodworkers

President Karen Browning called the meeting to order at 7:02 PM.

• Tonight’s program: “Small is Good” presented by Tom Cowan
• Members in attendance: (57)
• Guests: (6) Jessee Potter and son Luke – Manchester, James Daniel – Huntland, Tristan Teal – Manchester, Tony Dobert – Alaska, and Charles Mullins – Fayetteville
• New Members: (1) Dakota Slatton – Cowan (not present)

Reminders:

• President Browning reminded all guest to see Bob Addington, sign the guest sheet and pick up a copy of our “Splinters” newsletter.

Club events for 2013:

• The TVW Exposition will be at South Jackson Civic Center March 2-9 (Sunday through Sunday). Volunteers are needed for setup on Feb 28 and Mar 1, guides during the show, and teardown Mar 10. Contact Dan Maher to help or sign-up your display items.
• Coffee County Fair is in progress and will continue through Saturday, September 21. Doyle McConnell encouraged members to participate.
• Annual Christmas Party will be December 13 in Decherd.
• Twenty five folks have signed up so far for the Fall Seminar scheduled for Saturday Oct 19, at Tom Cowan’s Artisan Studio, in Cowan. The program features the expertise of Ronnie Young on furniture construction and Scott Tinker on finishing techniques. The $45 registration fee includes pastries, coffee, cold drinks and lunch. Have questions? - - contact Loyd Ackerman.
• Master Woodworkers Show will be held in downtown Knoxville Friday through Sunday, Nov 1-3, 3013. This is billed as the premiere show in the Southeast.
• Annual Christmas Party will be December 13 in Decherd.
• The Flute Circle meets at 1:00 pm on the last Tuesday of the month at the Cowan Artisan Studio. Contact Ron Reimers to confirm meeting.

Carvers Events:

• Meetings are held at Phil Bishops shop the 1^st Saturday of each month.
• TVW carvers will not participate in this year’s Polly Crockett Festival in Cowan.
• Huntsville Show will be 1^st week in November.
• Three Splinter Carvers participated in the Tims Ford Heritage Day that was held on Oct 12. A lot of folks had fun trying their hand at carving on the project and there were 126 signatures at the end of the day.

Announcements:

• The TVW Forum is back up and running. Everyone is encouraged to use it. The more participation, the better the database becomes. Contact Loyd Ackerman if you have trouble with log-on.
• Membership was encouraged to visit Henry Davis and the Club DVD Library.

Old Business

• Dues for the 2013 year are due and payable. Hand your $10 to Bob Addington. What a deal!
• Tools for Sale on the club web page, or contact Loyd Ackerman.

• See Chuck Taylor if your picture has not been taken for the website.

New Business

• A slate of nominations for all club officers except the president was submitted by the nominating committee. The candidates were: Vince Zaccardi – Vice President, Fred Heltsley – Secretary, Bob Addington – Treasurer, Phil Myers – Publicity, and Chuch Taylor – Newsletter Editor. Nominations from the floor included Karen Browning – President. A motion was made and carried unanimously to elect the slate by acclimation.
• The club wishes to thank the committee and the new officers for their service. Thanks also go to the “unofficial officers” Loyd Ackerman and Richard Gulley for keeping the Tool List, Forum, Emails, Webpage, and the Website up and running, to Henry Davis for managing the Library, to Doyle McConnell for arranging Shop Tours, and to the many other event chairs and presenters who make the club the worthwhile organization that it is.
• Briggs in Manchester has nitrocellulose spray lacquer gloss and satin for $28/gal. Eaton Hardware has brushing lacquer.
• John Duval is looking for a 1 1/4 inch threaded headstock insert. He has a 1-inch one to trade if anyone is interested.

Show and Tell:

• Tom Gillard – having no maple stock thick enough to make the tapered legs for a customer’s furniture, Tom devised a way to make them from birch plywood as tapered stave boxes similar to the tapered podium that he recently built. He brought the patterns and jigs that he used to cut and assemble the tapered pieces.
• Ross Roepke – brought a large four-drawer lidded box that he made to showcase a sheet of exotic veneer that Jim Everett recently gave him.
• Loyd Ackerman – brought a box that he made for his daughter’s twenty first birthday. He carved side decorations using his CNC router and personalized the lid with her name.
• Vince Zaccardi – brought five bowls that he recently completed from cherry and spalted maple. He acknowledged help from Doyle, Chuck, Matt, Loyd, and John Harton. The wood came from Karen’s Hollyberry Inn and a tree that Ken Daniels cut. The bowls were finished with spray lacquer and buffed.
• Chuck Taylor – brought a potpourri dish that he turned from apple wood and finished with lacquer.
• Doyle McConnell – brought a potpourri dish and red maple bowl that he turned and finished with multiple coats of Deft brushing lacquer sanding sealer. The maple came from a very large tree cut from wife Jewel’s home place.. He found that the Deft product flows on and seals well, but it does not sand like other sanding sealers. When he tried to apply a top coat of his usual lacquer, the surface bubbled up. He finally got a beautiful finish by applying multiple coats of the original sanding sealer.
• Bob Reese – brought the first of twelve 2013 family Christmas presents, a set of four inlayed trivets arranged on a display frame and held in place by magnets and steel washers. His almost-daughter-in-law provided the original inspiration in the form of a set of coasters that were similar but decorated with tiny intarsia pieces. Bob has found that his choice of inlayed geometric designs is labor intensive, and he hopes to finish all forty-eight pieces by Christmas.
• Bob Addington – brought a convex-carved plaque and a set of large letters, all cut on his CNC router. The deer scene was carved on a radius from 1.75-in stock and required ten and one-half hours to complete, with over half the time spent on the roughing cut. He used a eighth-inch ball-nose bit for the finish cut and took only ten thousandths of an inch per pass. Bob cut six letters to go on the wall above his granddaughter’s crib and spelling her name, WILLOW. She weighed only four pounds and one-tenth ounce at birth, but is definitely the smallest child in Bob’s family.
• Fred Heltsley – brought three goblets that he recently turned. The red cedar for two had been dead on the stump for several years. The first goblet was a scale copy of the Christian Church logo, and templates were used to reproduce the contours. The second copy was turned from memory at the C. C. Fair. The third goblet was turned for fun from very green hickory firewood and ended up becoming a “candle holder”, after the bowl inside diameter got larger than the outside.
• Jim Everett– brought four intarsia plaques, featuring an Indian, a fishing scene, a miniature flintlock rifle and powder horn, and an Indian head dress with an antique cast iron coat hook. His designs were rendered in various contrasting woods and decorated with pyrographic elements.
• John Duval – brought four bowls that he turned from pieces of waterlogged walnut. The wood came from the large walnut stump that he found floating in Tims Ford Lake and showed at the August TVW meeting. He acknowledged the value of lessons learned at the recent turning bee and the mentorship of Bob Addington and Tom Cowan. He described the problems he encountered with wild grain and loose bark when turning the natural-edge bowls and emphasized the value of wearing a face shield (he was hit three times during these projects).
• Greg Myers – told about inviting Reilly Earle to help him present a scroll saw program at a recent Huntsville Wood Club meeting (Greg was to present and Riley was to demonstrate sawing techniques). As it turned out, once Riley was introduced and got started, Greg didn’t have another chance to talk, and Riley presented an incredible program. Tonight’s show and tell is the scroll saw bowl that Greg intended to present at Huntsville. The bowl is made up of several contrasting woods and was made almost entirely with a scroll saw. Greg recently attended the John C. Campbell Folk School fall festival and was impressed by the variety of turned objects on display. He was told by some of the turners there that, instead of lacquer, they use polyurethane exclusively for wood finishing - - -  their reason given, “poly is food safe”.
• Mickey Knowles – was inspired by all of the puzzles that he saw at the C.C. Fair and brought four puzzles that he made when he got home. He planed the stock for each puzzle to a different thickness so he could tell them apart. He also changed the grain orientation for each piece to eliminate grain matching as a clue to solving the puzzle.
• Karen Browning – brought an antique “ironing board” coffee table that she found at a junk store. She asked for recommendations for refinishing.
• Tom Cowan – had several of his quarter scale miniature furniture pieces on the show and tell table, but he waited to describe them and their construction during his program presentation.

Program:      “Small is Good” presented by Tom Cowan

• President Karen Browning introduced the speaker and longtime member Tom Cowan
• Tom began by describing the construction of the miniature furniture pieces that he brought. He said that small-scale pieces were common in years past as salesman’s samples or as high-dollar children’s toys. Quality pieces are relatively scarce and highly sought after by collectors.
• All of Tom’s examples were “quarter” scale which is 3 in = 1 ft, one-fourth scale, or 1:4 ratio copies of full-size pieces. They are faithful in every detail, including the joinery and the inlaid decorations. His 10-in-tall chest model is an exact scaled replica of a 40-in-tall full-size chest. Note: “quarter” scale is not to be confused with “quarter-inch” scale which is 1/4 in = 1 ft, one-twelfth scale, 1:12 ratio, or “Barbi Doll” scale.
•  Because working in miniature often requires specialized tools or unique tool setups, Tom has an area in his shop dedicated to such work.
• He has rigged a router table lift with a 3/4-16 thread bolt so that a full turn moves the router up or down 1/16 inch, a half turn moves it 1/32 inch, a quarter turn moves it 1/64 inch, etc.
• He uses a Dremel router for cutting inlay recesses and recommends the Precision Router Base #5260 available from Stewart McDonald for $53.65. http://www.stewmac.com/shop/Tools/Special_tools_for_Routing/Precision_Router_Bases/Precision_Router_Base.html
• He says that the Dewalt Trim Router is also good and provides high visibility.
• Inlay stock is sliced to 3/64 in on his table saw, attached to MDF with double-sided tape, and drum sanded to final thickness.
• Layout patterns are drawn directly on the stock, cut out with a scroll saw, and cleaned up with knives.
• Good layout tools and sharp cutting edges are essential for the required precision.
• Tom has set up a special sharpening/buffing station for dressing his miniature cutting tools.
• For bending string inlay strips, he uses a soldering iron clamped in a vise, rather than the pipe and torch used for larger jobs.
• Shading is accomplished using a hot plate, an iron skillet, and fine sand. Dark outlines can be achieved by rubbing the inlay edge on the bottom of the skillet.
• Inlay pieces are assembled with Scotch tape on top, and the inlay outline is traced on the body with a knife point.
• The router removes background material to just short of the line, and the final trimming to the line is done with small hand tools.
• Recesses for non-shaded and string inlays are left slightly shallow so the installed inlays can be sanded flush with the body surface. Since shaded pieces can tolerate little or no sanding, they must be inletted at or just slightly below the surface.
• Tom uses liquid hide glue for attaching area inlays, but warned that the advertised shelf life is 12-18 months after manufacture. The expiration date is on the label.
• He uses Titebond glue for string inlays because of the void-filling properties and the open time.

The meeting was adjourned at 8:50 PM.