Tonight we welcome Chris Pouncy from Robert Sorby who will demonstrate their latest ‘goodies’ and try to persuade us that we really need them ! If you asked Roger to place an order for you, you should be able to collect it from Chris during break.
The competition item is ‘Any item of your choice’ and the Wood of the Month is Sycamore.
As you will know by now, we have the entire contents of a life long woodworker’s workshop For Sale. Information on the 67 lots and how to view and bid have been circulated by email and are on the Club web site. Note that bidding closes at 8pm on Tuesday 20 May. Successful bidders pay for their lots then and may remove goods. We need all purchased goods removed by Friday 23rd as we need to get set up for the weekend.
Only a couple of weeks until our major event of the year over the Spring Fling weekend. We have an advert for this in the Spring Fling brochure (20,000 copies) and in the May edition of The Bulletin which is delivered to every address in the Stewartry (12,730 copies).
Saturday 24 May. Full day demo by famous artistic turner Margaret Garrard. Tickets are available tonight from Phil J, £10 each including lunch and tea/coffee etc during breaks. Copies of the poster have been circulated by email featuring one of her superb pierced bowls. Extra copies are available tonight, at least display one in your car window.
Sunday 25 May, Monday 26 May. Watch, try and buy. This is for the public to come and see what woodturning is about, for us to recruit new members, and make some money. We are planning . . . .
Demonstrations by Club members.
Have-a-go sessions, buy a piece of wood for £1 or £2 and make a bud vase or tea light holder, guided by an experienced turner. Everything provided.
Make a wooden ball point pen for £5, again with a bit of help.
Exhibition and Sale of Members work.
Display and information about the club.
A raffle on each of Sunday and Monday.
Tea/coffee and traybake available all day for £1.50.
There are still plenty of opportunities for YOU to help. If you can only come for half of one of the days, that’s fine as we have split each day into morning and afternoon sessions. We’ll pass the clipboard around so that you can add your name.
We would appreciate some donations of home baking – please let David S know what and how many portions you can contribute.
We will need a few nice pieces to create a small exhibition of work; and lots of pieces to sell. These you can either donate all the proceeds to the Club, or we can sell on your behalf with the Club taking just a 20% commission. Everyone should be able to make at least one piece – exactly what is up to you. That way we should get a good range of items.
There should be an article and picture about our Lottery grant in Woodturning magazine, issue 267.
June
The topic for the June meeting is a demo of making Mallets with Phil J. The competition item is a plate for FOOD use – think about the implications of this. The Wood of the Month is Yew
Roger is organising some have-a-go sessions for a local Scout troop in June, the dates are Thursday 5, 12 and 19. He has a few volunteer tutors but could use more. If you can help, please contact Roger.
And finally . . .
A couple of dates for your diaries . . . .
Saturday 12, Sunday 13 July the Club will be at the Kirkcudbright Country Fair.
Saturday 2 August we will be at the Dumfries Show.
Volunteers to help at either event would be welcome.
We keep in touch with many of you by email which means that Roger has been maintaining distribution lists and Phil J has been keeping a list of paid up members. This duplication of lists has caused extra work and confusion over who has THE list of members. We have a web site that enables us to put information on the site and the site will automatically email registered users that new info. is available. In future we will use this facility and Roger will NOT send out emails or maintain distribution lists.
This means that if you want to continue to receive info. about the Club YOU NEED TO REGISTER ON OUR WEB SITE. This is a very simple two minute task – all you need to enter is your name and email address, and to specify a password.
We want to give members more opportunity to use the Workshop so we are going to open on Monday evenings as well as Tuesday, starting from Monday August 4.
Roger has been working on the programme of professional demos for next year; possible names are Nikos Siragas, Sue Harker, Philip Greenwood and Dave Atkinson. This year the attendance at the first demo was good but the attendance at the second, by Andrew Hall, was considerably less. It costs at least £300 to bring a professional to Galloway therefore we need to sell 30 tickets to cover this cost. If members are not interested in professional demos then the Club will not waste time, effort and money by arranging them.
By show of hands a large majority of members pledged to support a programme of professional demos next year.
The Club has bought 3 face plate rings (to fit both the Patriot and SuperNova chucks), a bowl caliper and a vessel caliper from Robert Sorby. The other jaw sets for our Evolution chuck (for the big Jet lathe) have arrived – 114mm Piranha jaws and O’Donnell jaws. We now have a good range of jaws for our chucks which will enable members to tackle a wide range of projects.
