hi, alan stratton from as wood turns (www.aswoodturns.com)a while ago, i took a class from molly winton who is here with me today. she has infectedme with wood burning, or what is the other word?branding pyrography. ok, anyway, she’s got me infected with it.i wanted to introduce her today and have her show you, your which brand was it?basket weave brand.
wood branding iron numbers, and, actually get it from, straight from,you do horses too horses right, so straight from the horse’smouth. straight from the horse’s mouth. you’renot offended by that? not offended at all.okay, let’s show you how to make the brand
and then to use it.great! ok, we’re going to make a basket weave brandusing 20 gage nichrome wire. this is my mandrel that i wrap it around. all it is, is a repurposeddrill bit that has this hex on the end because i can then anchor the wire which is roundto a flat surface in order to hold that wire as i wrap it. i’m going to lay about oneinch down the body of the hex end. then use a pair of vise grips to lock that wire firmlyonto the mandrel. then i’m going to wrap the long portionof the wire around the mandrel five times. i found that the size i want, i get in fivewraps. one, two, three, four, and five. i make sure that my coils are snug up againsteach preceding one. when i’m finished wrapping
those five, i’m going to make sure thatthe long portion of the wire is on the same plane as where the wire came into the mandrel,that they are not on opposite directions as the brand.remove the vise grips. slide the wire off the mandrel. now my legs are perpendicularand i want them parallel so they’ll fit into the wood burning pen. so i’m goingto take some needle nose pliers and hold onto the coil just firmly enough to hold that,so that when i bend the leg parallel, i’m not going to splay out the coils and distortthe brand. once the legs are parallel, i’m going totrim them so that they are about an inch to three quarters inch long. you don’t wantthem much longer than that.
and there is your brand.so, now we’ll put that into the wood burning pen. this is a home made pen because wheni brand for many, many hours, i need an ergonomically designed pen. so i make one myself. but youcan also get commercially made interchangeable tip pens if you don’t want to or don’tneed to make a pen on your own. but, they work exactly the same. you drop the two legsinto the terminals, tighten the set screws just snug – not too tight.then i turn my heat on my transformer all the way up high. pretty soon, that will getcherry red. you need it pretty hot because you want quick recovery time. that means thatonce you have – there it is cherry red – you have touched it once with the brand, and goto the second touch. you don’t want any
hesitation in the heat. that is why you needit as hot as possible. so, i’m just doing one row, all with anorientation, vertical because i like to have a border on my pieces. it is a good way toalign when i start changing the orientation, to make it look like a woven basket. thisfirst row vertical helps me line up subsequent rows.molly, what do you generally do about all that smoke that’s coming off?yes, there’s a lot of smoke being generated. it is really important. when i do this ona piece that i’m working on, i wear a respirator because you do not want to inhale this foryour lung protection as well as your sinus protection. so it’s important that you’rein a well ventilated area. and, i have a draw
fan that will pull the smoke away from myworkspace rather than blow across it. because if it blows across your workspace, you’regoing to cool down your tip. so, you want the draw fan to pull the smoke away from you,and pull that smoke away from you and out of your work area.so that’s a very important safety tip when you’re burning to really pay attention tohow that smoke is released. so, now that i have the vertical row, thenext row is where i’m going to start changing the orientation to get the woven look. so,i’m going to do two vertical touches right underneath two of the ones above it. theni’m going to rotate the piece so that my next two touches are horizontal. switch backto vertical and then horizontal. continue
this pattern of two vertical and two horizontaluntil this is second row is completed. how are you stabilizing your pen?you can see that the side of my hand is resting on my workpiece. when i have a round piecethat i’m working on, one of my turned pieces, i do the exact same thing. i anchor my handto get it as steady as possible. sometimes, i even put my finger out like an outriggerso that it just give as much steady control of where that brand is making contact withthe wood. and it helps to make sure your alignment stays true. and you just have more control.so once that second row is completed, you go on to row number three. right where youhad two vertical touches, now you’re going to go directly underneath that for two horizontaltouches. and then continue on with that same
alternating pattern of horizontal to vertical.the reason that i do five coils when i was making the brand is that length of the brand,which is approximately a quarter inch long, it give me a width touch of about 1/8 inch.so i want my woven pattern to square up when i have two vertical touches, when i go directlybelow it with two horizontal, i want to have them square off as closely as possible sothat the woven look stays aligned. you’re not limited to that. you’re onlylimited to your imagination of what you want to make. you can do all kinds of variationsof this particular brand by leaving gaps in between coils or not, doing four, or three,or seven. changing it however you want. so now, i’ve got three rows. my fourth rowagain i’m going to do the same thing i’ve
done before. when i have two horizontal, nowi’m going to go two vertical under that. now you’re starting to see the overall patternof the woven look because i’ve got three lines and it’s much more detailed exampleof how that becomes woven. i also find i touch and just barely overlap to just touch andthat helps me avoid unburned wood gaps in between here. here’s an example. we havea missed corner that i missed. so all i have to do is take the edge of the brand and justtouch that and it covers it up. and you’ll not notice that in the pattern once you getfinished with this section. what gage wire did you use for that again?this particular one is 20 gage. can you use a different gage?you can. what i’ve found is the 20 gage
is my standard size. if i want to reduce downor scale down, sometimes i’ll use a 22 gage wire – the higher the number the thinnerthe wire – very rarely do i go up to 18 gage, primarily because the commercial woodburning units, the more volume you use, the harder it is to have good recovery time whereit heats up. it tends to be a bit cumbersome, a slower process to use. most of the time,i use 20 gage for almost everything and then 22 to scale for a complex design when i wantto scale down in size. so there is an example of the basket weave.and that’s what you do. so here’s an example of a completed piecewith the basket weave on it. this particular piece is about 8 inches in diameter and probablyabout 10 or 11 inches tall. so the scale was
a little bit larger than my smaller 6 to 8inch pieces. so i actually increased the size of the mandrel that i wrapped the 20 gagewire around to get the brand to scale up and be a little bit bigger. so that’s how youcan also modify and change the basket weave brand depending on the size of the piece you’reworking on. i have some very tiny miniatures, 1 and ⽠inches tall, that’s when i scaleway down and use the 22 gage wire and a smaller mandrel like a 1/16 inch diameter drill bitthat i convert into the mandrel. the standard size that i make tends to be 5/64’s inchdrill bit. but again you don’t have to specifically have those. just find a smaller or a littlebit larger. play and experiment to find what you want. so that’s the example of a littlebit scaled up. here’s that border that i
showed you on the practice board so that wheni then started the first row of my basket weave, i could align it to the border. andthen, of course, you can see as you go down here is the weave is created. this particulardesign, i do the basket weave on the bottom two thirds, then i have my mustangs abovethat. so here’s another example, more of a standardsize that i tend to make. it’s probably about 5 and one half to 6 inches tall, maybefour inches in diameter. the basket weave brand that i demonstrated is the exact samesize that i used on this piece. so it’s 20 gage wire on the 5/64 inch mandrel. it’skind of my standard size brand. here’s a perfect example of how that looks like onthis particular piece.
you can see again, here’s the border. ido the same thing on the bottom of the piece too. i bring the border around the foot ofthe piece because as i come down and do the branding there’s no guarantee that it’sgoing to be an even finish at the bottom. and so, when i get maybe 2/3 the way downwith the basket weave, i stop and i put that vertical border around the foot so that asmy rows come down to that border i can blend it in on that very last row. if you can seeright here. here’s the last full basket weave and then there’s about half of a row.in this case on the horizontal touch, i did one instead of two. on the vertical, i tippedthe brand up on its end and just had about three coils touch the wood. then it blendsin.
with that, we’ll see you again next weekwith another woodturning video. i love feedback via your comments. please “like†thisvideo. if you haven’t subscribed, please subscribe to both my website and youtube channel.always wear your full face shield –goggles are not enough. until next time, this is alanstratton from as wood turns dot com.
