I have forged a few carving gouges which are much smaller than turning
gouges and being hand used are more suited for carbon steel rather than HSS.
Carbon steel holds a sharper edge than HSS and for hand work has good
duration. On a lathe they dull fast. When it comes to making turning tools,
I think you are far better off making Oland tools, scrapers, skews and
parting tools than gouges.

--
God bless and safe turning
Darrell Feltmate
Truro, NS
http://aroundthewoods.com
http://roundopinions.blogspot.com

"Fred Holder" wrote in message
ups.com...
On Sep 18, 6:24 am, Kevin wrote:
Recently there was some discussion regarding what kind of gouge to
buy. From what I read, the primary focus was on fitting the gouge to
the lathe and, more generally, to the type of work that was to be
done.
Sometime back, at least 2 or 3 years, I read that with a gouge you are
pretty much paying for a machined groove. That got me to wondering
why one could not make do with buying a piece of drill rod and having
someone with a mill do the honors and machine a groove down the length
of the rod. Apart from getting the mill work done to your own specs,
I don't really see a downside to this.
I looked around on the Enco site and found a piece of .5 O1 drill rod
3' 'for a bit less than $8.00. After milling the groove about all
that would be left to do is harden and temper the piece. At such a
low price, you could buy several and experiment a bit.
Has anyone done this and if so, any
tips?http://www.use-enco.com/CGI/INSRIT?P...INSRAR2&PMAKA=
619-1610&PMPXNO=16719366


Hello Kevin,

The cost of the steel is not what makes bowl gouges expensive. It is
the milling, polishing, hardening and tempering, makng and fitting a
handle, overhead of the manufacturer, marketing and shipping to the
eventual distributor, plus the distributor's markup. Have you priced
the cost of having a channel milled in tool steel and the cost of
having it heat treated as well as the clean up after heat treating.

If you have a friend who has a milling machine and will mill the flute
for you for free and another friend who does heat threating of steel
and will do it for free. You can get a fairly inexpensive carbon steel
bowl gouge from your O1 steel. I think that you will find that high
speed steel is a bit more expensive and the heat threating is much
more complex.

I have a friend who makes limited numbers of bowl gouges, very good
ones I might add, but he has to sell them for around $90.00 to
$100.00. And he sells direct.

So, when you consider everything, the prices on bowl gouges are not
really that great.

Fred Holder
http://www.fholder.com/Woodturning/woodturn.htm