On Sat, 7 Jan 2006 20:00:27 -0600, "Barry N. Turner"
wrote:

A dovetail recess as a design element? Yours must be much more beautiful
than mine!

Dovetails in fine handmade furniture may be considered to be design
elements. Some carefully disguised dovetail recesses on platter bottoms may
be acceptable to leave as is.

But I have seen very few dovetail recesses on bowls that could be considered
a design element. (Richard Raffan's, maybe.) If you wanna leave 'em on
your bowls, have at it. But please don't try to glorify them!

Barry

Spoken like a true turner, Barry...
Which is great if you're judging a contest at a turner's club or something..

IMH experience, buyers are really rather dumb.. they don't know anything about
how the bowl is made (or how their car is made), they just make uneducated
purchases because the like the way it looks..
I've never even seen one whip out a pair of calipers and measure the wall
thickness before handing over the cash..... whodathunkit!


"Bill C." wrote in message
...
M.J. wrote in message on Thursday 12 May
2005 12:59 pm:


Simple. I'd buy the one that showed the woodturner cared enough to
remove
ALL evidence of how the item was held on the lathe. I do that to all my
turnings just as a matter of pride and if it takes me a couple more
minutes
to do so then that is time well spent in my opinion. YMMV..........

I agree that it doesn't take a whole lot of time to do this and I think it
adds to the appearance of the piece.

What I don't see is the sense of making a religious war out of it.

While I, personally, prefer a finished bowl bottom, I am not a customer.

I repeat: I am not a customer. I bring practical experience to that
perception. A customer, however, brings a checkbook. That means that we
will each have different standards for excellence.

I think that a customer sees a dovetail recess as a design element and
evaluates it on that basis. Some like them, some don't. Sometimes the
dovetail works into the design of the bowl. Other times it sticks out like
a sore thumb. It should, I think, be neatly finished simply because
anything less would look, to my eyes, incomplete. But that is my opinion
and you are entitled to disagree.

If I were to set out a half-dozen bowls with the dovetail and a half-dozen
similar bowls without it and watched the bowls with the dovetail sell at
least as well as those without, my days of bottom finishing, except for
personal use, would be over.

Bill




mac

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