Fourth time and finally got it

[Gary Beasley]

The friendly owner of CAG lumber gave me a scrap of jobillo board they couldn't use due to a crack running up it. I took it home and cut a pile of cross grain blanks, knowing full well this was not going to be a walk in the park. Well the first three times the piece would get close to size and catch and shatter. I'd about lost my patience with it. Today I was feeling good about it so I tried it again. After setting up the blank and starting in to round it using my skew to shear cut it I was still getting splinters flying off. When I had a chip take off enough to show some tube I glued it back on and thought about it a bit. Then a revelation hit me, I was turning end grain, so I needed to flip the handle up and do a scrape cut. I tried it and was amazed at how well the cutting went after that. If you look near the clip you can see the chip I tried to hide, you could still see some brass there.

 

[76winger]

Actually in my own experience with a skew I'd be keeping it REAL close to vertical, extra sharp and doing a slicing cut for end grain. The scraping cut usually causes way more drag (and subsequent blowouts) than slicing cuts. But so long as it worked for you, that's what matters.

Great looking pen!

 

[Gary Beasley]

Actually in my own experience with a skew I'd be keeping it REAL close to vertical, extra sharp and doing a slicing cut for end grain. The scraping cut usually causes way more drag (and subsequent blowouts) than slicing cuts. But so long as it worked for you, that's what matters.

Great looking pen!

That was my thought too, but it's not so simple as just end grain. Rotating around the tube you get the grain laying flat and going back to ends up so at some angle the grain is facing straight in to the blade ready to dig in and sliver off. The dragging scrape cut simply pushes the fibers back down as it cuts them off and prevents the ends from being lifted and splitting.