Since retirement, I’ve been learning wood turning. At the end of COVID this was a bit challenging, since there were no in-person classes and for a kinesthetic skill you really want some personal instruction. So I read books, but most assumed I already knew things. Videos were sort of similar. If I had a dollar for every one that told me to “ride the bevel” without explaining WTF that meant my retirement would be much more comfortable. But I got tools and slowly made progress. At some point a few years ago I watched my first Richard Raffan video and I still watch every new one when it comes out.

Richard Raffan is an eighty year old Australian wood turner from England. He has a number of videos about how turning works. They make little use of video effects with the exception of speeding up some of the boring bits (e.g., sanding).

He is known mostly for his bowls and boxes and for his educational books and videos. He was a production turner from 1970 until his retirement and it sounds like he’s made in the high five digits of pieces. In “retirement,” he is trying to make a great variety of work and document the process for educational purposes.

He has a dry sense of humor and seems entirely unflappable. A great lesson in every art form (in my opinion) is how to recover from your (inevitable) errors. Richard doesn’t hide his mistakes, he acknowledges and fixes them. He usually doesn’t have a precise plan when he starts—you watch him design on the fly, sometimes making minor or major aesthetic changes until the end of the video.

He has written a number of terrific books which are still in print. I have Turning Boxes and Turning Toys and they’re both great.

I’ll suggest a few videos that I like for those that don’t want to explore randomly:

This was the first of his videos I ever watched. Someone poo-pooed it on the internet somewhere—I forget where. I found it and watched it and decided he was an exceptional resource: end-grain hollowing. For those non-turners amongst us, it is not at all as easy as it looks, unless you’ve been doing it for fifty years. If you’re not an aspiring turner, you might skip this one.

In the end-grain hollowing video he mentions a scoop video, so here it is. I think from internal hints that both were filmed the same day and might have been his entry to youtube. Later he does the filming himself but here we occasionally hear a camera operator. As with most of his stuff, the scoop is beautiful and not as easy as it looks to make.

A cedar bowl which ends up looking extremely pretty. Australia has an unreasonable variety of cool wood, only a little of which is available in the United States. And it all has much better names than North American wood. In spite of the beauty of this piece, it has splits he has to work around.

And finally one of my favorites, where Richard makes a wand for a young wizard which inspired me to try doing the same.