Our meeting on Thursday 6th March 2025 was a demonstration by Mark Sutton on the art of making boxes.
After being introduced by our new chairman, Mark gave the meeting a short history about his turning. He was a founding member of this club that started in 2006 and is still a member today. His involvement in the demonstration circuit came about by Alec asking Mark to do demonstrations at our premises. This led on to him doing demonstrations elsewhere . Mark always comes back to his roots in the club when invited to do a demonstration.
He then went on to show a few examples of boxes that he had made and allowed them to be passed around for the club members to see and to handle. He also showed the piece of wood he was going to use to make the box, which would be made in 2 part: the body and the lid.
He then proceeded to start to make the box, here are just a few pictures during it’s making .
Left: here is Mark showing the members one of his finished boxes, this would be the type of box he was to make during his demonstration, he also showed the piece of wood he was to use to make his box. The wood was Beech and it was a little punky. Right: the view through the safety screen as Mark got going turning the square into a round.
Left, here Mark can be seen hollowing out the body of the box. Right, the body of the box now parted off, ready for the base to be re-worked.
Here is mark showing the finished box. After making the lid he re-worked the body by doing some texturing work , that was followed by some Pebeo paints being applied as can be seen on the box. This texturing and colouring would normally be applied all the way round but time did not allow for this, so this was as far as he could go.
The chairman thanked Mark for his excellent demonstration and asked for a show of appreciation from the members, that concluded the demonstration.