March, 2007

Our March meeting features member and past president, Jim Rinde.  Jim will speak on the use and abuse of epoxy resins in wood turnings.  Jim writes  “I have been using epoxy resins in my wood turning since 1988 (sometimes I have been successful and sometimes not). I started using them because they are materials that I worked with in my day job [Jim was an epoxy chemist] and felt I could use them in my turnings to give them special characteristics.  I will show various examples of my work to illustrate different uses and will cover three areas: Their use as adhesives, coatings and potting/encapsulation.
 If you have a question about epoxy resins in general or a resin system you are using bring them to the meeting and I will try to find an answer for you.”

The February meeting was presided over by vice-president Harvey Paskowitz as we inaugurated the Oxnard High School woodshop as our new Hands-On teaching site.  Thanks to Shop Instructor Chad Meyring who has arranged with the school principal and district to let us use the shop on Saturdays every few months.  The shop has 4 working lathes and plenty of room for us to bring our own small lathes.  The shop has 3 Jet lathes (1″x 8TPI) which is standard and fits our own chucks and tools.  There are also two unusual Woodfast lathes.  These apparently date from 1988 and came directly from Australia or New Zealand without going through Provo, Ut.

The unusual part is that they were called Bowl Lathes and are smaller than the short bed Woodfast lathes that we are used to.  Also they have a 1″ x 8TPI head stock  threaded spindle instead of a Morse #2 taper and 1 1/4″x8 TPI threads.  One is currently in use and the other needs to be mounted and a motor attached.  The one that is working is slightly larger than a typical current midi-lathe.  It works beautifully and since it has the same thread all of the lathes in the shop are interchangeable.  See the photos below for the excellent photos of the shop that Ron Lindsay took.  Chad was very helpful in getting us organized and using the large Powermatic band saw to cut out blanks for us.  We do need to bring our own wood, tools, safety gear, and the usual extra shop supplies that we consume.  Having outgrown Russ Babbitt’s garage, it looks like the Oxnard High School will serve us well for the hands-on teaching part of our program.  Remember that you must be a current member of AAW in order to use the lathes, so be sure to join if you haven’t already.

The program Schedule still has some blanks left for program chair Joe Levy to fill, so check back each month to see what he has in store for us.

The new 2007 Member Directory is almost ready for distribution.  Ron Lindsay has spent hours transferring all of the information into an Excel spread sheet so we can keep track of member renewals, frequent changes in email addresses and easily add new members as they join.  I will then convert this to a Word document to distribute to current members.  We expect to have it ready to email out in a week or so.  Thus the email announcing this newsletter will still use the combined 2006 and 2007 Google email list.  However, as for mailing out the directory and subsequent notices to members, they will go only to current 2007 members.  You can renew or join at any time, and we will add you our membership directory.  Contact Ron at Treasurer for information.

Judy Grange and Russ Babbitt have the library rearranged, and probably by the next newsletter the on-line description of our loan books and videos (and DVDs) will be ready to post sorted by title, and by author.  See the Loan Library page for the new loan policy regarding replacement of missing items.