Name: Lee DeRaud
How young are you? 56 going on “Who knows?”
Physical description:
5’10”, 200 pounds, arranged roughly like an Emperor penguin but with longer arms and legs. I have about the same hairstyle as Andre Agassi, with a lot less skilled labor involved.
Where is home?
Anaheim, California for the last 32 years with most of it spent in the same house. I did the Air-Force-brat thing most of my life: Alaska, New Jersey, Alaska again, Georgia, Colorado, Virginia, Florida. School in Colorado, then came out here and settled in with a vengeance.
Family information:
Long-time GF Sandy, AKA “Cheesehead”…we just got back from a visit to “The Motherland” (Green Bay). Several kids of the four-footed persuasion: my dog Ozzy, her dog Bosco, and the cats Scooter, Bibsy, and Blue.
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Do you have a website?
Yup. But don’t get too excited, it’s currently just a picture of Ozzy…one of those things that just never seems to make it onto the first page of the “to-do” list.
Vocation:
I spent 31 years at Rockwell/Boeing, mostly developing sonar and navigation software for Navy ballistic missile subs: it turned out that herding 1s and 0s was as close as I’d ever get to using my math degrees. A long time ago I decided that when it quit being fun, I’d stop doing it, so as of 2005, I’m (very) happily retired.
Shop Overview:
About 400 square feet of attached garage, jammed to the gills with power tools of various sorts: TS with built-in router table, CMS, planer and jointer, belt-disc sander, drill press, routers…the usual. Oh, yeah, and the lathe and grinder. Most of it is smaller hobby-grade stuff: the only “full-size” tool I own is a bandsaw. All of it is either on wheels or small enough to go into a cabinet, since I’m kind of anal about keeping the car inside at night. Maybe not quite as tight as Stu’s dungeon, but pretty compact.
The spare bedroom upstairs houses the laser and its computer, and I sometimes use the dining table when I need to spread stuff out.
After years of the typical home-improvement projects and a few pieces of furniture, I made a conscious decision to limit my woodworking to projects I could pick up with one hand. (Doing a single-handed build and installation of a Murphy Bed was a big factor in that decision.)
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How many lathes do you own? Tell us about 'em.
Just one lathe, a Jet mini of the non-VS variety. I figured if it could survive the kind of abuse it took in Woodcraft classes, I’d have a hard time killing it. Nothing new on the immediate horizon: a bigger lathe would take up room and money I have other uses for. Not to mention that the only thing it would do is let me turn bigger pieces (which take up more room) out of bigger chunks of wood (which cost more).
How many turning tools do you have?
The traditional Harbor Freight 8-piece set, a ½” Sorby bowl gouge, and a Sorby Hollowmaster. I’ve reground the HF scrapers to my liking, but they’re slowly getting replaced with somewhat heftier models. The Sorby bowl gouge is pretty much my “go-to” tool, and I’m (finally) starting to get the hang of the Hollowmaster (or at least not curse at it quite as much).
How long have you been turning, and what got you started in the first place?
First time I ever even touched a wood lathe was in a Woodcraft class this past February, although I dimly recall making a centerpunch on a metal lathe 40-odd years ago in 8th grade. Bought the lathe in mid-March, so I’m just past the 6-month mark as I’m typing this. As far as why? It seemed like a good idea at the time, which explains an awful lot of what I do.
New page coming right up.
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Originally Posted by Karl Laustrup
