General Meeting—Feb 17, 2018

Our February General Meeting will be held at Marty Mikovits’ Cabinetmaking shop in Mason, NH. Please register here.

Our agenda includes another segment in the What’s in YOUR Shop series, a featured presentation of Mike Foster’s work in turned art, and of course our meet and greet with coffee and donuts.

Agenda

• 9:00    Meet and Greet – coffee and donuts
• 9:45    What’s in YOUR Shop – Sandpaper
• 11:15  Business Meeting
• 12:00  Brown Bag Lunch – BYOL
• 1:00   Turned Wood Art by Mike Foster
• 3:00   Adjourn

“What’s in YOUR Shop”
Each General Meeting we pick a rather mundane topic that impacts all of us and invite each and every attendee to share his or her thoughts and experiences.  The series is not so much a presentation as it is an “audience participation” event.  So, come and let us know what you think of this meeting’s topic: SANDPAPER

Sanding and Sandpaper
Sanding – something we all love to hate.  But it’s the first step in getting a fine finish on our projects.  Sandpaper has come a long way since the first recorded use of sandpaper in 1st-century China. Do you have a favorite type of sandpaper or abrasive?  Flint, garnet, emery, aluminum oxide, corundum, silicon carbide, zirconia, ceramic, diamond? What backings do you prefer?  Or do you reject sandpaper and use a finely tuned smoothing plane or card scraper?  What techniques do you find helpful?  [Do you tire of putting a perfect edge on a scraper?  Take a piece of picture frame glass, scribe and break a new edge and use that – it really works!].  Do you know the difference between CAMI and FEPA grading?  Power sanders - random orbit, belt, disk, stroke, detail sanders – hand sanding, contour sanding, the list goes on and on.  Come and give us your thoughts on this mundane topic that all of us have encountered in one way or another.

Featured Presentation
Our afternoon will feature the Turned Wood Art of Mike Foster.  The great outdoors, the sciences, science fiction and the relationship of math and science are some of his interests and provide endless sources of inspiration for his turned work. He has received numerous awards and has been featured in a number of publications, most recently the February, 2017 edition of American Woodturner.  If you have not seen Mike’s work, take a look at his web site: http://breezyhillturning.com

Mike will present a slide show that briefly covers the body of his work, much of which has deep roots in math and the sciences. He will display some of the forms that has resulted from this exploration, and include slides on how he went about creating some of the more complex forms using the lathe as his primary tool.

He will then do a brief demo how to turn a sphere using the shadow method.

The resulting sphere will be marked for 8 centers that will then be used to turn the sphere between centers to create an octahedron.  During the demo Mike will explain how he expands on the technique to create a number of geometric forms and show some examples of the results.

Getting there
Marty’s shop in Mason is west of Nashua and directions to 165 Brookline Rd., Mason NH 03048-4508 can be found on Google Maps.  We expect winter parking will be limited at Marty’s shop, so please carpool if you can.

A few Reminders
Don’t forget a chair and brown bag lunch. Also, this will be the Last call for participating in our group purchase of discounted Taunton Magazine Publications.  See our website for details.