If you missed Soren Berger, you missed one fine woodturning clinic. He magnificently covered basic turning techniques, taking great pains to explain grain issues, tool angle and cutting principles. He truly is a master of his craft and a delight to learn from and watch.

Soren, born in Sweden, has lived in New Zealand since he was 8 years old. He still speaks Swedish and has returned to his homeland, as well as to many other countries, to demonstrate. As a turner for 25 years, he is very aware of the fact that the woodturning heritage in the U.S. is in it's infancy as compared to countries like Japan and Russia. Soren feels that the biggest advance in turning in the U.S. has occurred in the last 20 years as the craft transitioned from scraping to cutting. Spindle (pattern) turning was mostly done by scraping, but now, due to influences from people like Key and Raffan (to name a couple), both turning techniques and toolshave changed. Soren's turning philosophy is akin to playing ice hockey. Skating technique and practice gain confidence and agility on the ice. The same holds true for turning. If you want the flowing curves and elegant shapes, you need to understand what the tool is doing and understand the grain as second nature. Of course this takes practice and good foundational knowledge of tool control. That's where he began.

Soren spent a good bit of time discussing the importance of understanding the grain and what types of cuts cleanly sever the grain or make "mush" of the grain. He started with a 1 ½ roughing gouge, stressing that the joy of turning is creating nice shavings through tool control via a sharp tool. He stressed the importance of maintaining proper relationship of the tool to the piece, and how important posture and position of the hands on the chisel are in achieving a clean, flowing cut. He demonstrated the skew, the bowl gouge, spindle gouge and bedan, constantly stressing the pros and cons of each in a given situation. For instance, he uses the corner of a roughing gouge to create a chuck tenon. He also likes using a bowl gouge with a straight grind that ultimately behaves like a skew chisel, but with better control. He left me dazzled as far as what he does with a roughing gouge and a bowl gouge. Soren has designed many tools and demo'ed some of them throughout the day. After the tool demonstration, Soren mounted a green ash bowl blank on a 3/8 inch screw chuck and showed his approach to roughing out a bowl. He used a one inch roughing gouge initially on the outside, and then switched to the half inch bowl gouge for the finish cuts, cutting on the right side of the gouge as he worked from the bottom of the bowl out to the rim. By cutting on the right side of gouge, he gets a skew-type cut that eliminates tear-out. He mounted the bowl on a chuck and began hogging out the middle with a roughing gouge. Then he switched to a bowl gouge and pointed out that as you transition from the side of the bowl to the bottom, you need to move your leading hand back towards the back of the chisel, and let the let the chisel flow - don't push. He said this is the secret to attaining smooth cuts and eliminating tear-out.

During the afternoon session he tackled a vase, a multi-axis scoop and discussed vacuum chucks. A notable tip concerning the vase was that he removed the top from the vase for hollowing and re-inserted it after the hollowing process was complete.

He then formed the neck of the vase and cut 3 small grooves at the base of the neck - one groove hiding the seam where he glued the neck back on. As for the scoop, he showed us how to turn a sphere by using different size rings as guides to attain a perfect sphere. Once the sphere and handle was finished, he offset the handle end by about 3/8 of an inch and re-turned the base of the handle, and up to the base of the scoop creating the multi-axis effect. He then placed the piece into a jam chuck and hollowed out the sphere forming the scoop. He sanded both pieces to 1200 grit, applied Watco oil, and buffed them with Tripoli and carnauba wax. They were beautiful to say the least!

What a rich day we had with Soren! He imparted so much information that it is impossible to capture it all in this short article. The techniques he demonstrated, and the concepts he shared were invaluable. You need to watch the tape if you missed this awesome demonstration. I guarantee it will enrich your turning experience regardless of your skill level. Thank you Mr. Berger!

--Jerry Edmonston

Soren's Web Site