On Mon, 21 Jan 2008 09:26:39 -0800, charlieb
wrote:

The various Post Lathe processes all take more tools, more materials
- and a lot more time. Do I really need to learn yet more techniques,
more materials/mediums? There's already so much to learn with pure
single axis turning. Why head down another yet another path when I
haven't really explored the immediate vicinity of where I am now?

So I asked those of you who have ventured Over The Next HIll
- is there still THE BUZZ? Are there Zen Moments - Out There?

All depends on who you are, and what you want to make! There are
*always* "Zen Moments" with whatever you're doing. I've found that
combining metal and wood is more or less my favorite thing to do-
sure, it may take a little more time and tooling, but setting the
grain of the wood off against a smooth, clean sweep of shiny brass or
steel is a thing of beauty. Might not hurt to add glass into the mix
one of these days, but I'm holding off because I'm not that eager to
make an annealing oven right now.

Like I said, it all depends on who you are- but, I've found that
trade, craft, and art are like languages. While it may seem like it
would be hard to take on several new ones at once, if you try it, it
actually turns out that every new skill adds to your understanding of
the ones you already have, and eventually, you begin to see the bones
of how they all work and it's much easier to do many things well than
it is to labor at one simple task with a more limited understanding.

As an example of that somewhat poorly-expressed idea, when I was in
school, I studied both French and Spanish. I was continually asked
how I could manage to do that, but it's actually very simple- both
languages come from a common root (Latin) and they share many
similarities not only in grammatical structure, but also have many
roots in common when learning the verbs. So, while exploring each
with different teachers, I learned at least two approaches for each
concept rather than a single viewpoint. What that meant in practice
was that if one teacher was not very good at explaining how some
aspect of a particular construction worked, and resorted to forcing us
to memorize the concept by brute force, there was still a chance of
understanding the reasoning behind the method in the other. It works
the same with wood and metal, or multi-axis and single-axis turning,
or any number of other disciplines that may seem to be different, but
are actually much more similar than they appear at first.