Oneway Easy Core System

[Steve Eure]

I'm looking at a few different coring systems and I am a little confused on the Oneway. For those of you who have experience with it, can you enlighten me on the different knives they offer. I have an 18" lathe and was wondering if you could get by with just a few of the knife sets, or do you need all of them. I would think that you could just use a few of them instead of buying all 4 sets..
Also, any others who have different systems, could you provide some insight on them also, to help me make a wise decision. As costly as these systems are, I want the best bang for my investment.

Thanks,
Steve

[Karl Loeblein]

Two knives would give you 3 to 4 cores from an 16” to 18” inch bowl blank. Suggest starting with the 13 1/2” knife first and then decide if you want to go up one size or down one size. Might be nice if you had a turning club to test one out because coring can be really hard on your lathe. Not unless you can justify the expensive carbide blade cartridge from Mike Hunter that is highly praised by several members on the www.aawforum.com for how easy it makes coring. https://huntertoolsystems.com/product/coring-cartridge/

[roger wiegand]

I almost never use the largest knife both because I seldom get wood that big and pretty much no one needs or wants a bowl that big. The smallest knife makes a small bowl, a size where, for me anyway, wood of that size is abundant and it's quicker just to hollow it with a gouge than to set up and use the coring system. So I'd say the value lies in the two middle size knives for most reduction of green blanks. The biggest one is great when you've got a monster log to work with, the smallest useful if you have a valuable piece of stock you're starting with.

[Reed Gray]

You do not need all of the knives, but me, being me, I got the full set. One consideration for you, most do not like the standard cutters that Oneway makes. The Hunter Core Pro is by far preferred. They are not cheap. I will update mine at some point, but not sure when. I still prefer the McNaughton. Next step for me with the McNaughton is to make my own blades so I can get a perfect curve for the entire length of the blade, including the last 2 inches....

robo hippy

[Karl Loeblein]

You do not need all of the knives, but me, being me, I got the full set. One consideration for you, most do not like the standard cutters that Oneway makes. The Hunter Core Pro is by far preferred. They are not cheap. I will update mine at some point, but not sure when. I still prefer the McNaughton. Next step for me with the McNaughton is to make my own blades so I can get a perfect curve for the entire length of the blade, including the last 2 inches....

robo hippy

Robo, Have you tried modifying the McNaughton to take the Hunter core pro cartridge?

[Neil Strong]

I still prefer the McNaughton....

robo hippy

+1 for the McNaughton.

I also had the Woodcut but found it less flexible than the McNaughton.

[Reed Gray]

I know that Mike Hunter has made tips for the McNaughton. He did one for me. I can't remember how it performed. I did replace it with tantung. I have replaces some tips on the McNaughton with tantung, which is similar to the stellite used on the Woodcut coring system. The problem with the McNaughton system is the bend on the blades. The last inch+ tends to go straight rather than follow the perfect curve. I do plan to make my own blades, and heat the tips so I can bend them to perfect arcs. I chatted with Kel about the curves on his blades and he maintains that they are 'spot on'. The reason they drift to the outside of the coring kerf is because of the tip not following the perfect arc. I have a blade or two where I have tweaked the end of them a bit and one actually pulls to the inside rather than the outside.

I have no clue as to why Oneway sticks with their coring tips. I have gotten a couple of different responses from them about it. One was that the spear point is supposed to break the fibers and the sides cut the fibers away. Another was that the point keeps the blade on course for the cut so that it will not drift. I don't think either point gives good results on the coring. I did have them send me a tip that had been hardened, but did not have the point on it. I ground the back end sides down a bit, wider on the cutting end, maybe 5/16 inch and tapering back. It cut far better than their standard tip. I mean a huge difference in how it cut. They told me they didn't sell it that way because it wasn't safe, or some thing like that. I don't agree at all. The nice thing about it was that you didn't have to remove it from the blade to sharpen it. Just a few sideways passes with a coarse diamond hone and you got a nice burr. All coring blades are scrapers, and in most cases a scraper needs a good burr. While I haven't tried the Hunter core pro, I would guess that since it is cup shaped, it will cut/shave similar to a scraping tool. No idea why Oneway has not done some thing about this. They are losing business because of it.

I am still waiting for the new and improved Woodcut system to come out..... I have one of the old ones. It is a simple set up, and does work well. I did run into some chattering issues when coring some black locust.

robo hippy

[Pat Scott]

Robo, Have you tried modifying the McNaughton to take the Hunter core pro cartridge?

A year ago I sent my McNaughton knife to Hunter Tools to have him modify it to accept the Korpro cutter. Hunter sends the knife to someone else to do the machining in the end of the knife to accept the cutter. When I got the blade back I thought Hunter Tools installed the wrong size Korpro because the width of the cutter is only 1/32" wider than the width of the blade.

I tried it and had all kinds of problems with the blade binding in the kerf after only cutting an inch or two deep. I emailed Hunter Tools and asked him about it, thinking maybe I had the #1 cutter by accident instead of the #2 cutter. Mike Hunter responded that I had the correct cutter and I just needed to clear chips more often to prevent binding. He said the Korpro cuts so easily that chips can build up faster. I've been using the McNaughton for over 10 years and I knew that wasn't the problem - you know your tools after using them that long and you know how they should behave. But I tried clearing chips more often and nope, that's not the problem. The problem is the Korpro cutter is pretty much the same width as the blade and doesn't cut a kerf wide enough. If you look at pictures of the Korpro on the Oneway system you can easily see that the cutter is wider, so I don't know why it's not for the McNaughton.

I've been tempted to contact Hunter Tools again and tell him this blade is worthless as is. I hate it. I bought a brand new McNaughton blade so I could get back to coring. What a piece of crap! Man has quality control gone in the toilet with McNaughton since I initially bought my system. The end of the new blade was so fat with blobs of sloppy welding it was unusable. I had to grind a lot of extra weld off before I even used it. It looks like I have it the way it should be but somethings off. It works but it doesn't work as well as my original blade before I had the Korpro installed. Like I said, you know your tools.

I've been so disgusted with the Korpro and with the replacement blade that I'm looking to buy the Oneway system.

Here's a picture showing the "new" McNaughton replacement blade and Korpro cutter. You can see the crap welding job on the new knife.
483904 483908

Here's the Korpro knife sitting on top of the McNaughton knife:
483910 483911

Here's the new McNaughton tip width vs Korpro width. The 3rd picture is the width of the blade.
Also a picture from Hunters website showing the Oneway knife with Korpro. Look at the width!
483912 483913 483914 483915

[Neil Strong]

A year ago I sent my McNaughton knife to Hunter Tools to have him modify it to accept the Korpro cutter... When I got the blade back I thought Hunter Tools installed the wrong size Korpro because the width of the cutter is only 1/32" wider than the width of the blade.

....

Mike Hunter responded that I had the correct cutter and I just needed to clear chips more often to prevent binding.

I hesitate to engage in this discussion with an coring expert like Reed participating, but if that was the response from Mr Hunter I think it absurd!

There is more deflection in the coring bar than 1/32".

I can see you are using spear points on you coring tips. I found that tip profile on the McNaughton produced butterfly shavings that were more prone to clogging. I modified my tips as you can see on the right in the following photo (I think following a suggestion from Reed) and the clogging reduced at least in the first half to two thirds of the cut, so that did help.


483967

The side bevels are asymmetric in an attempt to encourage the cut to remain on track with the bar curve.

For awhile I thought about mechanising the cut with a router tip rotating via a flexible shaft. There were two snags to that idea; the bearing/collet to hold the router bit would produce too wide a cut to be useful in saving wood and the finer shavings produced by the router bit would perhaps clog even more than the scraping tips... so, I put that away in the 'probably not a good idea' basket.

[Peter Blair]

A little off topic but I made a simple laser aid to help me set up my oneway.
You can find a blog of it here
https://wordpress.com/post/woodbowlsandthings.wordpress.com/628

[Reed Gray]

In theory, 1/32 inch clearance on both sides would work. It does not work because the bends on the McNaughton blades are fine except for the last 1 to 1 1/2 inches. My guess is that they profile the blades first, then bend them after profiling. The problem with that is that you can not get enough pressure on the tip to make it bend to the proper curve. Just lay your blades out on one of the clear plastic circle templates and you can see this. This is why you need to open up the kerf when making deeper or longer cores. If you have a critical eye, you don't need the template to see it. I checked my blades, and I have 1/16 minimum on each side of the blade. With 1/32 inch clearance, you would probably need to make a double wide kerf.

I had the early McNaughton blades, and they were flush with the blade on the inside, and dog eared to the outside. I remember hearing that people 'altered' their cutting tips. I did bevel to the inside, bevel to the outside which is how they came, and bevel straight across. I settled on the straight across tip. Like Neil above, the spear point would butterfly and clog up more than the straight square tip shavings would. The spear point design was a Mike Mahoney idea, and he said it made it easier to core all the way to dead center for parting off burl pieces or crotch wood since they were prone to ripping through the bottom of the bowl if you tried to break them out. I discovered that the problem with cutting a core all the way off was that with the pressure on the cutting tip when extended out a ways, your cutter was below center. I learned to drop the handle a bit to compensate for this. I can now 'feel' when the cutter is below center. This is a master level skill. You can also raise the tool rest a bit to compensate. If you have ever tried to remove the stub/tenon left when you break the core out, you will note that the cutter drops considerably below center.

Could one heat the blade tips to add that last little bit of curve? I don't know. I have put some in a vice and bent them a tiny bit more. My main concern would be that the hardened material Kel uses for the cutting would delaminate and then you would not have any cutting edge at all. With my personal ones, I use tantung to replace Kel's cutting material. It is a lot thicker. Woodcut uses stellite, which is a similar material. Their first ones had a slight concave top surface, and I liked the way it ejected the shavings. It seemed better than the later flat topped ones.

robo hippy

[Neil Strong]

....

robo hippy

This is the [Thanks Button], which I would press if this forum software had it.

[Ron Borowicz]

Robo,

The Woodcut Bowlsaver Max4 is available according to an email I received from them. Seems to have a lot of good features. Pricey. With your experience on all of the coring systems it would be interesting to have you do a trial on it and give us your thoughts.

[Dave Bunge]

Regarding the OP's question on the Oneway system:

1. I agree with Roger W's comments that the two middle sized knives are the more useful ones. The small one is also good if you have a valuable piece of wood, like a burl. I've made a few bowls with the largest knife, but I still have them (they are too big for my outlets. Others' experiences may vary.)

2. I purchased carbide cutters to replace the HSS ones that Oneway supplies. I've been very happy, have cored many bowls with no resharpening needed yet. I got mine from AZ Carbide. https://azcarbide.com/product/1way-coring-carbide-cutter/

[Mike Goetzke]

Regarding the OP's question on the Oneway system:

1. I agree with Roger W's comments that the two middle sized knives are the more useful ones. The small one is also good if you have a valuable piece of wood, like a burl. I've made a few bowls with the largest knife, but I still have them (they are too big for my outlets. Others' experiences may vary.)

2. I purchased carbide cutters to replace the HSS ones that Oneway supplies. I've been very happy, have cored many bowls with no resharpening needed yet. I got mine from AZ Carbide. https://azcarbide.com/product/1way-coring-carbide-cutter/


Do you have any experience with the OneWay carbide inserts?

I put my McNaughten set up for sale here. I did so because I didn't use them enough to get experienced and justify having them (actually turned the smallest arm into a pretzel but Robo gave me hints how to straighten it out.). Ha - I got sucked in the vortex (again). The guy interested in my McNaughten had a basically new OneWay system that I got my arm twisted into making a trade :D. Mine have the carbide cutters so was wondering how they perform on the long run.



Mike

[Peter Blair]

Thanks for the link. I buy my carbides from AZ but did not know they had this. I have wanted one to try but the price I was seeing was just too much for my budget! I will be ordering one from Ron this week!

[Thomas Wilson80]

Thinking of getting the easy core system - If using the carbide cutters, do you buy a separate cutter for each knife or is it easy enough to switch one cutter between the different sized knives?

Thanks,
Tom

[Peter Blair]

It is really quite easy to change the cutters BUT it is also very convenient no to have to!! I see that AZ Carbide sells these as well and it appears from here that they are less expensive although I have no idea about the quality of the carbide!