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As a beginner, & from the advice of my mentors, I agree with whats been said. When I first started, I worried about what the shavings looked like. Why was everybody else throwin' long strings of chips, & mine looked like sawdust:( On a small budget, & teaching myself to hand sharpen, I went back to the books & read some of the important parts over again. And, finally finding a mentor, he sharpened my tools, & showed me the ins & outs of sharpening. Once I got my angles figured out, my shavings got a little better than sawdust.
The next thing is learning how to use the tool in your hands, & speed your running. My first lathe, the lowest speed was 750 rpm. It was exceedingly tough to learn to rough rough out a spindle, much less anything else. I'm not a bowl turner, I turn for fun, & to go along with some of my scroll projects. My shavings still don't look like the long ones do, some still look like sawdust, but the end result is what I want it to be.