The 'secret' to successful hard turning is high surface speed. Applications typically involve tripling or quadrupling the surface speed used for carbide inserts when CBN inserts are substituted. CBN (also called PCBN, polycrystalline cubic boron nitride) is a man-made material second only to diamond. For a GPT hard drive, the bootable partition used to boot the OS and contains the boot manager program for the OS EFI System Parition (ESP) A lean operating system that can be used to troubleshoot problems when Windows refuses to start.
Watching an experienced woodturner develop and form an exquisite bowl, spindle or other turning from a block of raw wood can be inspiring, and in some cases, intimidating sight. But learning the basics of woodturning isn't difficult. After you know how to use your lathe safely and the techniques for using each tool, it becomes a matter of practice. The following tips will give you some of the basics of woodturning.
While wood turning technically falls under the umbrella of woodworking, it is often considered a completely different craft. Woodturners tend to be devoted to their craft, and many have little (if any) interest in other traditional fine woodworking skills since there is almost no end the projects that can be created on a lathe alone with the proper tools and techniques.
The tips that follow summarize some of the most important elements of good wood turning practice, with links to articles containing more detail.
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What Is Woodturning?
Wood turning is the process of carving a block of wood into a symmetrical object, such as a wood spindle or bowl, while using a motor-driven lathe to spin the wood at high speed while cutting tools, including a variety of chisels and knives, gradually carve the piece into the desired shape.
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Practice Wood Turning Safety
Statistically, woodturning probably ranks among the safer tasks performed with power tools. Still, there are basic safety practices you should learn and follow to ensure woodworking safety.
- Inspect your lathe regularly to make sure fitting are secure and tight.
- Keep your work area clean.
- Make sure lighting is sufficient. Being able to see what you're doing will help ensure safe work.
- Make sure tools are kept clean and sharp. Dull tools can catch on the spinning workpiece, while razor sharp tools will cut smoothly and easily.
- Use quality wood stock. Workpieces with cracks or thick knots can break apart or grab cutting tools.
In this photo, for example, the woodturner is breaking several of the first rules of woodturning:
- Always wear eye protection when turning wood. Should a workpiece splinter or break apart, injury to your eyes is a distinct possibility.
- Avoid loose fitting or baggy clothing. They can easily get ensnared in the spinning axle of the tool.
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Get Proficient at the Common Wood Turning Profiles
When turning a block of wood into a spindle, there is no end to the creativity that's possible, but no matter how elaborate the final shape, these profiles usually consist of a fairly small number of basic common cuts put together in different combinations.
To create the most common cuts—square cuts, V-grooves, fillets, and coves, you really only need four types of tools (along with your lathe, of course).
Practice these various profiles using the tools required to cut them on your wood lathe.
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Learn How to Use a Roughing Gouge
Most woodturning projects on the lathe are started by using a roughing gouge to create the basic shape, whether a spindle, bowl, bottle stopper, or nearly any other woodturning project.
The roughing gouge is a very versatile gouge, but it must be used properly (and safely) in order to get good results. The first step in learning the craft of wood turning is practicing with the roughing gouge.
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Use Caution With Skew Chisels
Few woodturning tools can be as dangerous as the skew chisel. Sometimes used for making square-grooves, it can also plane and shape many other profiles. However, the skew chisel's propensity for grabbing means that the wood turner must use the proper safety precautions to keep from getting into trouble with one in their hands.
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Develop Skill With a Parting Tool
The parting tool is a specialty woodturning tool that is commonly used to separate a finished turning from the rest of the stock, separating the stock into two parts (hence the name, parting tool). However, it can also be used for other tasks, such as cutting square-shaped grooves in a spindle.
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Practice Project: Turning a Hammer Handle
Many woodworkers use a lathe to turn spindles and bowls, but did you know that you can use your lathe (and the corresponding hand tools) to cut oval-shaped hammer handles? If you break the wooden handle on your favorite hammer, don't throw the head away. Get a nice piece of hardwood and head to the lathe to form a new hammer handle to your liking.
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Dress Properly
One of the most common injuries in woodturning occurs when an article of the turner's clothing gets caught in the spinning lathe. By wearing proper clothing for woodturning, this potential hazard can be greatly reduced.
Windows uses a page file to store data that can’t be held by your computer’s random-access memory when it fills up. While you can tweak the page file settings, Windows can manage the page file fine on its own.
The Windows page file is somewhat misunderstood. People see it as the cause of slowdowns because it’s slower to use the page file than your computer’s RAM, but having a page file is better than not having one.
Image Credit: Blake Patterson on Flickr
How The Page File Works
The page file, also known as the swap file, pagefile, or paging file, is a file on your hard drive. It’s located at C:pagefile.sys by default, but you won’t see it unless you tell Windows Explorer not to hide protected operating system files.
Your computer stores files, programs, and other data you’re using in your RAM (random access memory) because it’s much faster to read from RAM than it is to read from a hard drive. For example, when you open Firefox, Firefox’s program files are read from your hard drive and placed into your RAM. The computer uses the copies in RAM rather than repeatedly reading the same files from your hard drive.
Programs store the data they’re working with here. When you view a web page, the web page is downloaded and stored in your RAM. When you watch a YouTube video, the video is held in your RAM.
Image Credit: Glenn Batuyong on Flickr
When your RAM becomes full, Windows moves some of the data from your RAM back to your hard drive, placing it in the page file. This file is a form of virtual memory. While writing this data to your hard disk and reading it back later is much slower than using RAM, it’s back-up memory – rather than throwing potentially important data away or having programs crash, the data is stored on your hard drive.
Windows will try to move data you aren’t using to the page file. For example, if you’ve had a program minimized for a long time and it isn’t doing anything, its data may be moved from RAM to your page file. If you maximize the program later and notice that it takes a while to come back instead of instantly snapping to life, it’s being swapped back in from your page file. You’ll see your computer’s hard disk light blinking as this happens.
Image Credit: Honou on Flickr
With enough RAM in modern computers, the average user’s computer shouldn’t normally use the page file in normal computer use. If you do see your hard drive start to grind away and programs start to slow down when you have a large amount open, that’s an indication that your computer is using the page file – you can speed things up by adding more RAM. You can also try freeing up memory — for example, by getting rid of useless programs running in the background.
Myth: Disabling the Page File Improves Performance
![Hard turning shops Hard turning shops](https://is2.ecplaza.com/ecplaza2/products/2/2d/2de/481503600/hard-turning-bearing.jpg)
Some people will tell you that you should disable the page file to speed up your computer. The thinking goes like this: the page file is slower than RAM, and if you have enough RAM, Windows will use the page file when it should be using RAM, slowing down your computer.
This isn’t really true. People have tested this theory and found that, while Windows can run without a page file if you have a large amount of RAM, there’s no performance benefit to disabling the page file.
However, disabling the page file can result in some bad things. If programs start to use up all your available memory, they’ll start crashing instead of being swapped out of the RAM into your page file. This can also cause problems when running software that requires a large amount of memory, such as virtual machines. Some programs may even refuse to run.
In summary, there’s no good reason to disable the page file – you’ll get some hard drive space back, but the potential system instability won’t be worth it.
Managing the Page File
Windows automatically manages the page file’s settings for you. However, if you want to adjust your page file settings, you can do so from the Advanced System Settings window. Click Start, type Advanced System Settings into the Start menu and press Enter to open it.
Click the Settings button under performance.
Click over to the Advanced tab and click the Change button in the Virtual memory section.
Windows automatically manages your page file settings by default. Most users should leave these settings alone and allow Windows to make the best decision for you.
However, one tweak that may help in some situations is moving the page file to another drive. If you have two separate hard drives in your computer, assuming one is the system drive with your programs installed on it and one is a less-used data drive, moving the page file to the data drive can potentially offer some increased performance when your page file is in-use. Assuming that Windows will already be using the system drive if it needs to use the page file, this spreads out the hard drive activity instead of concentrating it on one drive.
Note that this will only help if you actually have two separate hard drives in your computer. If you have one hard drive separated into multiple partitions, each with their own drive letter, this won’t do anything. Whether it’s partitioned or not, it’s still the same physical hard drive.
In summary, the page file is an essential part of Windows. Even if it’s rarely used, it’s important to have it available for situations where programs are using an unusually large amount of memory.
Having a page file won’t slow down your computer – but if your computer is using its page file a lot, you should probably get some more RAM.
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