A pop-up workshop was filled with Wandering Termites for a long weekend of woodturning at the Tween Waters Holiday Park Merimbula on May, 17 – 20.
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Sixteen mini lathes were busy at work on a variety of salvaged timber.
“Most of what we are using at the moment is salvaged from really old elms from the Candelo Showgrounds,” Wandering Termites member Paul Croese said.
The woodturners prefer to use salvaged wood as timber “is costly to buy.”
“When you do spend money on timber, you think that you have really got to make something good out of it,” group member Paul Healy said.
Mr Croese and Mr Healy are also members of the Bega District Woodcraft Association and said they aim to harvest timber themselves and to source it locally.
“There are a lot of exotic timbers planted around the place that council will often come and chop down – they will then just put them through a wood chipper,” Mr Croese said.
“We really make use of it. The wood might be a rotten branch, but there is a third of that which we can use.”
The Wandering Termites began 14-years ago, “it was two guys wandering around with their lathes and it picked up from there,” Mr Healy said.
The group is made up of woodturners from Pambula, Bega, Narooma, Jindabyne, Melbourne, South Gippsland, and Wagga Wagga.
“We get together once a year. The weekend is about camaraderie, woodturning, swapping stories and ideas,” Mr Healy said.
The challenge set for this year was to create two identical wooden eggs.
“It takes skill and a real good eye to do this challenge,” Mr Healy said.
Doug Batty of Bega twisted the idea differently to the rest of the group, using a unique looking timber to create his take on the challenge.
“I have used osage orange timber for the yolk of the egg – no one mentioned it had to be uncracked,” he chuckled.
Mr Batty’s work with the osage orange timber created striking yellow wood shavings, he said “it is commonly grown on dairy farms across the Bega Valley but it is a native North American timber traditionally used by Osage Indians to make bows.”