A sanity check if you please......

[Bill White]

I seem to be seeing more and more postings and sites touting the use and ease thereof regarding the carbide tipped turning tools. Just wondering what the opinions are about them. Sure seems easier, but then I'm used to the standard lathe tools. Whadaya think?
Bill

[Ken Hill]

I like them, they have their place. I have an EWT round cutter and a CF1 square cutter. If I have a deep bowl, the round cutter works well for the transition area. The square cutter hogs wood off pretty fast for getting a blank balanced out. Both will cause some serious tear out if you get too aggressive, however both can produce some very clean cuts as well. I switched to the radius cutter and have far less issues over the original square bit.


I dont think they will replace a gouge, but they can help in some areas that give new turners a few issues.

[David E Keller]

I think they have a potential place in the arsenal, but I'm personally not a huge fan of the few carbide tools I own. Tim Rinehart just made me a nifty little ornament hollower that works like a charm, but the others I have are less appealing to me. I've not purchased the EWT brand, but they seem to have a nice folkowing. For my turning and style, I still prefer steel. Your mileage may vary...

[Alan Trout]

I personally feel you should learn to use a conventional gouge, skew, scraper, etc. and then if you feel you need them go ahead. I do have one EWT it works well for some specific task and I rarely ever use it. It will never replace my bowl gouge, skew, or spindle gouge. Now for hollowing I do like the carbide because I use a lot very abrasive materials and they hold up well under extreme conditions. The faster I can get the stuff out of a hollow form the happier I am.

So for the short answer they do have their place but do not replace a conventional set of tools IMHO.

Alan

[Dan Forman]

I use square or squarish cutter much more than the round. The square cutter is ideal for cutting the tenon for mounting on the Oneway serrated chuck, as it cuts the tenon and the 90 face at the same time, and generally does it very cleanly. It can also rough a relatively small spindle blank very quickly. The radiused cutters work very well for pen blanks, and for turning off the tenon of a bowl mounted on a vacuum chuck, directing the force toward the spindle, taking small bites, and making a slightly concave surface. I haven't used the round cutter very much, as I prefer to use a scraper with a wider shaft, so that I am not limited to cutting with the nose of the too, but can use the sides as well. Try that with the Easy Finisher, and it will immediately tip off the small 1/2" shaft and cause bad things to happen. It might prove more helpful in spindle work, but I haven't done that much of it.

My experience has been that they can cut very cleanly when fresh, the quality begins to suffer relatively quickly with use, more so than one would think given the reputation of carbide. They can be sharpened on a diamond stone if you don't let them get too dull, but the sharpening is done on the flat top, so if you wait too long, thats a lot of carbide to wear away in order to get back to a sharp edge.

Dan

[Richard Allen]

We are in a transition time of woodturning tools. The HSS tools are still king but there are more and more uses for the carbide tools. I suspect in a few more years there will be woodturners who produce outstanding work and never sharpen a tool. Right now the shapes available for the cutting edges of carbide tool are limited to what carbide inserts are used in other machining. This is to say that existing cutting edges are being repurposed for woodturning. There will be someone who will take the leap to make woodturning cutting tips. Soon after that there will be folks who stop using HSS for the majority of their woodturning.

There will be new techniques to go with these carbide cutting edges. We will see demos from woodturners who are making wonderful objects on the lathe using these carbide tools. Those demos will open the minds of some to the possibilities.

Right now Lyle Jameson, of the captive bar fame, prefers carbide for hollowing. This is a world class wood turner who does many demos a year.

The more woodturners who use the carbide tipped cutting tools the more new techniques will be developed and shared. The limits now seen with carbide tips tools will become advantages not only for no need to sharpen but also because there will be techniques which can only be done with carbide tipped tool.

[Jon McElwain]

My thought was that the carbide tools offer a super easy learning curve plus no sharpening. Learning to drive a bowl or spindle gouge takes some time, especially if you are not up to speed on sharpening. We have a nice advantage here with lots of help, lots of threads talking about grinds, tool presentation, turning speed, etc. etc., but think of the people who are not on forums, and have not bought every dvd available on the subject. When I started turning, I had a lathe, a handful of tools (a few were HSS), and a bunch of wood, but I had no concept of how to sharpen tools properly. All my bowl and spindle gouges (I didn't know the difference at the time) were ground like my roughing gouge. Talk about a learning curve. I did a bunch of spindle work and got pretty good at that, but lost interest quickly. I tried to do a bowl, but you can imagine how frustrating that was with the grinds I had going. It was not until I saw a Taunton Press mag. on woodturning that I started to gain access to the vast network of forums, DVD's, internet sites, etc. and started to learn what I was doing wrong.

All that to say, given a carbide easy rougher style tool, I would have been making bowls right off the get go, and I would not have fought dull tools (I am embarrassed at how long it took me to learn the importance of sharp tools and how to sharpen them)for so long. As woodturning gains popularity, I suspect that the carbide tools will continue to gain popularity, especially if they get someone closer to turning cool stuff right away. It could be "better" to learn to turn with the tools we are used to, but I also agree that the carbide tools are something that is changing how people turn wood. Think of Ellsworth and how he started - he has seen some serious changes in how woodturning is done. If my memory serves me, when he started turning, the traditionalists said you should never use a scraper and never use sandpaper.

How long (number of projects, or time) did it take for YOU to learn to sharpen and how to properly use your non-carbide tools?

[Tim Rinehart]

First, I'm a traditionalist in also wanting to use my HSS and CPM tools, especially where they have clear superiority in finish and speed, when properly sharpened. That being said, there are some people who may not want to invest the time/practice/space for even basic sharpening equipment, and the carbide tipped tools have a niche there for exclusive use and they have done a good job in filling most any turning situation with a tool for that.

My experience using carbide tipped tools for very specific tasks started about 2 years ago when I made a square carbide tipped tool for roughing, similar to the large Easy Wood roughing tool. I still use this tool for knocking off the bark and rough edges from very ugly pieces of wood that would otherwise have ALOT of interrupted cuts using a 5/8" bowl gouge, my normal roughing tool for bowl and vessel blanks. Some folks use versions of this tool for entire roughing and even final shaping...that's fine, but it's not as efficient or effective in my usage vs a good sharp bowl gouge. But it has it's place.

I can use the square carbide (mine is mounted on a 1/2"x1/2" bar about 12" long and extending another 8-10" in the handle) very efficiently and get to point where I'm ready to apply a gouge much sooner than using the gouge alone, but I don't use it every time I rough. These are zero rake cutters that are held horizontal (90*) to the workpiece, and so are basically just very sharp scrapers. There's a reason you see these often mounted with little clear plastic screen/deflectors...they can evacuate some material!

I got some round positive rake carbide cutters (similar to Hunter tools) and then made a tool to reach down in bottom of vessels to remove the little dimple from my forstner bit...this works great for me and doing this several times I got used to how the carbide tip wanted to be pushed/pulled for best effect. When doing a pull cut, as from bottom of a rounded vessel, you can actually ride the bevel to get a clean cut.
When doing a push cut from the opening towards largest inside diameter, you're doing more of a shear-scrape and leaving a very clean finish.

Either one is superior IMHO to any hss scraping or even carbide scraping using zero or negative rake cutters. With exception to very minimal sanding near an opening, I no longer even try to sand out interiors of hollow forms and with most all of them, you'd have to try hard to find tool marks or tearout once you get the knack of using the carbide in the correct orientation and application. For hollow forms, I'll not waste sharp carbide tools on roughing cuts...I'll use HSS for that unless I have really hard materials or wood with high silica in it that dulls HSS too quickly.

I also use the carbide tools to clean up freshly glued rock inlace, which really plays havoc on HSS, and I even use it clean up the end of the copper ferrules on tools handles I make. My 'dimple removing tool' has a 8mm positive rake tip mounted on a 1/2" diameter shank and I've only changed the tip once in the past two years, and it's the one that also does my ferrule cleanup...so you really do get alot of life from the tools.

I bought a Hunter tool with a moderate swan neck for a piece I was working on about 2 years ago and was hooked on using them for finish cuts mainly, but I've used them for entire hollowings too as I did with an ornament tool I made for my peach vessel I posted over the holidays. The positive rake tools will reward you with very nice cuts but they take a bit of practice to use them correctly. Don't get me wrong, the EWT swan neck looks to be a very efficient way to remove a lot of material in a well thought out and machined handle, but I don't think they will produce the finish the positive rake tool will, but they will likely be better than most scrapers, and at worst, as good as a scraper. For this reason, as Ken pointed out, they are a nice way of dealing with the transitions inside a bowl, and the smaller contact point of cutting probably makes them much less catch prone, YMMV.

The recent AAW journal did a nice article on the little retrofit tools that helps clarify technique, as does the recent Woodturning Design that did an article on the 3/8" shank version of the positive rake tools.

[Jim Underwood]

I may have missed it but I don't see any mention of the different kinds of carbide.

The latest AAW journal has an article on it that I found fascinating, and now can't wait to try out the nano-grain carbide...

Lyle Jamieson first declined to use carbide until he learned that shiny nano-grain carbide is far superior to your standard grade grey carbide. It stays sharper longer than either HSS or grey carbide.

Any of you carbide users notice the difference?

[Bill Wyko]

I have a question about carbide as well. When it does dull, can you sharpen it on a standard wet sharpener? If so, how quickly can it be done? I find that with the proper jig for setting up your tool, sharpening most any kind of standard turning tool can be done in a minute or two. Even an Elsworth can be done in less than 2 minutes.

[allen thunem]

carbide will eat that wet stone up quickly.
only thing im aware of that sharpens carbide is diamonds or cubic boron nitride wheels. please correct me if i am wrong.

[Jim Underwood]

I think you're right Allen. I've tried grinding regular machinists carbide with carborundum grinding wheels and they barely make a difference. More chippy than anything akin to sharpening. I know that there are rubber wheels that are impregnated with some kind of abrasive that will sharpen carbide too, but I forget the compound they use in those. Perhaps they are obsolete now?

I was always under the impression that carbide wouldn't get as sharp as HSS and HSS wouldn't get as sharp as carbon steel, the difference being that the HSS edge would last longer than carbon and carbide would last longer than HSS.

Now, according to Jamieson, the nano-grain carbide will get nearly as sharp as the HSS, and will last like 20 times longer...

Lemme go get the mag and I'll quote him directly....

[Jim Underwood]

Well I was off just a tad...

Lyle quotes Tom Walz, President of Carbide Processors Inc.

"Consider that the sharpness level of HSS is in the range of 1 to 20, with 1 being the sharpest possible for HSS starting out. Nanograin carbide, on the other hand, starts out at 2 or 3 sharpness. Turning with both for the same amount of time, HSS is dull and has reached a 20 while the nanograin carbide is still sharp at a 4 or 5 in the 1 to 20 range."

Lyle goes on to say:

I believe they [nanograin carbide inserts] will wear up to 100 times longer than HSS.

So Lyle was convinced anyway.

I'm wondering what experience you all have had with this stuff?

[Bernie Weishapl]

I have the Ci1 and Ci0. Both are fine tools and stay sharp for a long time. The Ci1 rougher has a radius cutter on it. I use it to knock off the rough edges, bark, etc then settle in with a bowl gouge. I have did about 30 bowls with it and have yet to turn the cutter. The Ci0 finisheer is a good finishing tool and use it for woods like ash, elm, etc. Have yet to turn the cutter on it.

[Curt Fuller]

I haven't used any of the commercially sold carbide tools but I built a few tips for my Jamison style hollower that use the small round carbide cutters you can get from here http://www.carbidedepot.com/wood-turning.htm. I like them because they seem to hold an edge forever. But to get a real nice smooth surface inside a hollowform I still go back to a HSS teardrop scraper for the final cuts because I haven't developed the skills to knock down all the little ridges and valleys left by the small carbide cutters. And I'm just so comfortable forming the outside of a vase or bowl, or the inside of a bowl using a bowl gouge that I can't imagine using a carbide scraper for that. Now if you could get a nice affordable carbide 1/2" bowl gouge that would hold an edge for a year or so, that would be the ticket. Even if you had to ship it back yearly to refresh the edge.