The local woodturning club, Chapel Hill Woodturners, hosts workshops on various woodturning topics. I went to a workshop on Texturing turnings yesterday and was amazed at what you can do with this technique. I had seen texturing tools before but was skeptical on how versatile they were.

Well! Let me tell you, with just one or two tools you can turn out some fantastic stuff (If you know what you’re doing)!

I learned that you can create quite a wide variety of patterns by controlling various factors when using the tools. The resulting pattern depends on:
1. the tool – there are a few basic tools in a range of sizes. Each tool has its own range of patterns.
2. WHERE on the workpiece the tool is applied. If close to the center of workpiece then you can make things like flowers or snowflake patterns. If placed on the out surface you can get narrow bands of patterns. If you move it while texturing then you get a wild array of patterns!
3. How fast the workpiece is turning. This will affect the texture spacing to some degree.
4. How hard and how long you apply the tool to the workpiece.
And probably a dozen other factors that I probably missed during the full day session.

In any case, one of the things we did, besides tear up a whole bunch of wood, was to create our own bowl with whatever texture design we want. Being unsure of how reliable I could do something interesting, I was conservative and made the bowl below. But, even with this, the bowl stands out from anything I’ve made so far, so this new technique is very promising indeed!

Side of textured bowl. A nice decorative band around the outside of the rim.
I didn’t texture the inside since I figured we might actually use this for something!

Bottom view showing the texturing on the base and the overall shape of the bowl. This was actually surprisingly easy to do, although a bit daunting as it is very easy to mess up the texturing.

Here is the bottom detail. Even the ‘flower’ was cut with the same tool as the other two bands. It’s all a matter of how and where you hold the tool and how fast the piece is turning. It will take a while before I can do this consistently!