As far as types of wood to use for turning, you want to stay away from Oak - the grain banding tends to turn it into projectiles. Both open grain and closed grain woods turn well, as long as the pores are diffuse. Generally, you want to stay with hardwoods because softwoods are, well, soft. The guide that I use is 5000/diameter. If you have a 2 inch block of wood, you can safely turn at 2500 rpm; at 5 inches, you go to ~1000, and so on.

As far as books, I have found that anything by Richard Raffan is very informative and he actually shows you technique! I think he does DVDs too.

Two things - buy yourself a face shield (you can get them cheap from Harbor Freight) and NEVER use a roughing gouge on a bowl - the lathe will throw chunks of wood at you.

Hope that helps.

MJ


--------------= Posted using GrabIt =----------------
------= Binary Usenet downloading made easy =---------
-= Get GrabIt for free from http://www.shemes.com/ =-