Craobh Eo Woodturners demo focuses on sharpening, cuts and hollowing
Willie Creighton walked Craobh Eo members through sharpening, cut sequencing and hollowing, with a three-tier bowl challenge adding extra club edge.
A bowl that looks built, not just turned, set the tone at Craobh Eo Woodturners’ June 11 meeting in Aghamore, where Willie Creighton focused on the sharpening and cut sequence that keep work controlled at the lathe. The evening moved from setup to finish with a clear practical aim: show members how clean transitions, not rushed cuts, change the feel of a turning.
The club met at 20:00 hrs. on Thursday, June 11, 2026, in the Craobh Eo Centre, the Old Schoolhouse in Aghamore, Co. Mayo. Craobh Eo says it is the Mayo chapter of the National Irish Woodturners Guild and was formed in 2004, with monthly meetings held every second Thursday in the same room, along with seminars and workshops. Its events calendar also includes an annual seminar, usually at the beginning of the year.
Creighton began by talking through the tools on the bench before mounting a blank between centers with a Simon Hope steb kit, which uses three steb centers and a mounting unit. From there, the demo went straight to the grinder. He showed how to sharpen a gouge on the grinding wheel, then used the blank to demonstrate how to round it up and shape end grain with a spindle gouge while forming chamfers, fillets, ogees and beads. He also brought in a carbide bead tool so members could see the surface it leaves, and he showed how to cut tenons with both a parting tool and a gouge.
The hollowing section was just as hands-on. Creighton drilled out end grain with a Forstner bit, then hollowed a box with a scraper and a Simon Hope hollowing tool. A second blank became a bowl exercise: he mounted it on a screw chuck, turned a recess with a skew, added beads to the bottom, then remounted it and hollowed the form with a bowl gouge and a Simon Hope round scraper. The finishing cut came with a sharp bowl gouge, after which he rounded off the front face.
He closed with a Sorby Pro Edge gouge sharpening demo and then shifted to a larger bowl blank to show a pull cut for shaping the underside. Robert Sorby says the ProEdge is intended to make sharpening simpler and more accurate across a range of tools, including woodturning gouges, and lists specialist accessories such as a woodturning sharpening accessory kit and a fingernail profile kit. For Craobh Eo members, the night tied sharpening directly to the cut on the wood, which is exactly where a good demo earns its keep.
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