charliel belde
Every nice piece has to start with a nice form. If the form is wrong - it don't matter what you do after that - burn it, scortch it, pierce it, paint it, carve it, color it - it'll still be NOT A NICE FORM.

Now there are ways to get around "not so good" turning techniques (it's called SANDPAPER). But if you don't develop a good eye for FORM - you'll still turn recognizable pieces - but they probably won't be NICE pieces.

Now the way to develop an eye for good form - is to turn a bunch of that form. Todd Hoyer has probably turned several thousand bowls - and he's STILL working on turning the perfect bowl. To the rest of us, he got to the PERFECT BOWL quite a while ago. But his eye for the bowl form is much more finely tuned than the rest of us.

So, for the rest of us, are we to spend a decade or two turning the same form over and over again, refining and fine tuning with each new bowl? And if so - where are we to get all that wood - and what are we going to do with all those shavings : )

Well - there is a way to take a short cut - get there in less time using less wood and creating less shavings.

The actual SIZE of the form isn't that important. It's the FORM that's important, regardless of size.

MINIATURES!

A three foot dowel, even of poplar, can yield 40 or 50 little bowls - of different sizes and shapes, none taking more than half an hour to turn, sand and finish. Rather than one or two pieces a day, you can do a dozen or more - six to eight times more. AND - there's no getting beat up while roughing, no Scare The Crap Out of You catches, no flying chunks of wood, no floor covered in curlies.

Got a form you've been unable to get "right"? Turn miniature versions. By the tenth one, maybe sooner, you'll have a pretty good idea of what you've been doing wrong - and be a lot closer to that NICE PIECE that now exists only in your head. It's getting that FIRST one right that's the hard part. Once you've done one, scaling it up gets a lot easier.