OK, so what does everyone think of the competition? Has it been good this year? Could it be better? Do we make it anonymous or should entrants be clearly displayed?

Also, maybe I’ve got too much time on my hands, but I worry about little things like how we aggregate the totals! Over the year we have ten competitions and at the end of the year we total all the results and hail the new club champion. All well and good… unless you were unable to enter on a couple occasions (due to being ill for example) which pretty much eliminates any chance you had of getting your hands on the coveted cup. So my question is, does this matter?

I personally don’t have any great ambition to win, it’s more about taking part and my goal is to encourage more people to enter. If the chance of winning is completely lost by missing just one competition, then my fear is that people won’t see the point and won’t bother entering anything else. Conversely, if we only counted the best five entries from each person over the year, then my fear is that there would be less incentive to get out there and turn something for the competition: I should get out and turn something, but I won’t bother this month because I can afford to put it off until next month, or the month after that, or… oh is it December already?

Faced with this little conundrum I thought it would be interesting to see how this year’s results would compare if I totalled all nine or just the best five (see table below). Turns out it made very little difference to the rankings with Persons 2 and 3 the only ones to be different. However it did bring the top results down significantly which could potentially make goal of rising up the rankings seem more achievable and therefore encourage more people to enter more often.

At this point I have to confess that I was ‘Person 3’, the only person who got a better ranking using the ‘best five’ method, so clearly I can’t trust my own judgement on this because I might have a prejudiced view!

So like I say, maybe I’ve got too much time on my hands: maybe this doesn’t really matter and won’t make any difference anyway. But if anyone has an opinion one way or another I’d be really interested in hearing it.

Cheers, Phil J

Dear All,

A week to go to our next monthly meeting and a quick update on what’s happening.

The subject for this month is Laminated turning and it will be me that is “up front”

The competition for this month is a cup and ball toy following Rolf’s demonstration last month.

Later this month sees the North of England Woodworking show at Harrogate to which some of our members are going.

The committee is currently finalising the programme for next year with the thoughts of more demonstrators form outside the club. This will give a more varied programme and will also free those of us who currently do most of the demonstrations – unless, of course, we get more members to volunteer to demonstrate.

The turning Tuesdays still command a good following; so if you’re free on a Tuesday evening please come down to Roberts Workshop.

Phil H. and I are also currently giving tuition on the basics of woodturning and I think that both of us have people waiting in the wings – All this bodes well for the club.

Keep making shavings
Roger Cutler