It was probably only about a year ago that I first had a go at making apples and pears; up until then I never really fancied it. However, I designed and made my own chuck for turning them, such that I could cut standard sized blanks, 65mm square stock, 80mm long for apples and 120mm long for pears. Each blank gives a fruit complete with its own stalk, so there's no waste at all, beyond the 2 or 3mm that gets sanded off the end of the stalk so that it's left at a jaunty angle, which seems to look better than leaving it squared off. I can now comfortably turn out a batch of ten in just over 2 hours, including buffing them with microcrystaline wax.
A couple of weeks ago I was low on stock of fruit in the shop, so rummaged around in my boxes of scrap woods to see what blanks I could prepare, and made a batch of 20. When I got them to the shop we realised that there really were two different qualities; the basic ones out of the less striking timbers, and the more attractive ones out of scraps of burrs, bits of laburnum, yew etc, so we decided to have a range of 'Premium Timbers' fruit, and to bump the price up quite a bit. These were put in the window, displayed on a yew platter, and a customer came in the next day and bought the whole lot. So yesterday I made another batch and managed to complete 16 in a little over 3 hours. We've displayed them in a little sea-grass box and bumped the price up a little, again.
Let's see how they sell this time!
C&C always welcome...Les
