My name is Ed Ashford. I was born in 1964, and I live near Moira in County Down. I started wood turning around 1989 when my father got himself a Coronet No 3 lathe, a 2/3 HP (0.55 kW) medium lathe with a 12.5" (317 mm) swing (i.e. maximum diameter around 24") and about 48" between centres. He also bought the bowl turning attachment, and the headstock swivels so larger bowls can be accommodated, or problems with the gouge hitting the bars on large bowls can be avoided. My first bowl was a very square looking elm bowl around 7" diameter, mostly with the scraper!
I was working in Short Brothers Aerodynamics Department, and at the time Shorts had a weeks closure at Christmas and Easter to allow for factory maintenance. I would hop on a plane at Belfast Harbour Airport (BHD) which at the time was two portacabins (one for departures and one for arrivals) on an APEX fare, and head to East Midlands where Dad would pick me up. Christmas usually involved a turning project, although one year we mad an elm coffee table which I needed for my sitting room in Holywood, having no furniture other than a deck chair at the time.
Time passed, and I became reasonably proficient, making a large chess set, a hollow form (I still can't quite believe I did this), and gifts for friends. In 1994 I got married, and the holidays at Mum and Dad's stopped, along with the turning. In 2017 Dad's eyesight was failing, and he asked me whether I had a tow hook on the car as he was thinking of letting me have the small trailer when we visited. I had a hook fitted, and when we arrived he said since I was taking the trailer, I might as well take the lathe. It's pretty heavy, and his bench wouldn't fit my garage, so we took it all apart and stowed the many, many gouges, chisels, parting tools and scrapers and a large collection of pieces of wood that had been collecting under the bench.
I had changed from aircraft to computers in 1998, and in 2014 our daughter was born and I moved to a 32 hour week with Wednesdays off. In 2017 she started pre-pre-school, so I had an hour each Wednesday to work on building the bench, and then assembling the lathe. After a month of Wednesdays it was complete. And there it languished until January 2023 when Mum announced she needed a new honey dipper. I made a tentative start, and began to get my feel back for the lathe, and along the way realise just how much I had relied on Dad for sharpening tools!
I found quite a few of the pieces I had brought back with me had some woodworm, and I had stored them in a bin bag laced with insecticide. Now I laid them all out, and began to start turning the wormy pieces. Some worked, some came out rather small, and some made a quick trip to the wood burning stove.
In May 2023 I retired as I couldn't face the thought of going back to sitting in the traffic jam on the Westlink every night, and started to take at least one day a week turning, often turning the outside one day, and finishing the bowl the next (this is not a good idea, they can change shape overnight!). Gradually my skills improved, and I watched videos by Kent Weakley of Turn a Wood Bowl.com and Alan Batty on the skew chisel, and latterly by Mike Holton, getting ideas, improving my turning and improving my tool sharpening. The really big improvements were a CBN wheel for the 8" Sealey grinder and a decent tool platform for the grinder.
Naturally the shelves in the garage tend to start filling up with bowls, and one only has so many friends who can be persuaded to take one as a gift, and I was talking this over with a friend one day when he mentioned a small gallery in Hillsborough called In Klöver. I took a Sainsbury's bag of bowls along, Claire picked out a few, and they started to sell. Not massively, but fairly steadily. Sadly in January 025 the impacts of Covid, the general slowness of sales following the interest rate rise, and competition from online places took their toll, and the gallery closed. So now I am about to explore the world of Etsy, which is kind of why I started putting the site together, as well as it being a bit of a momento.
The site in its current iteration is just a simple Amazon AWS S3 bucket at belongalyd.com, and an Azure static web hosting (free tier) which gives me https for belongalyd.co.uk. Nothing fancy, with mostly old-fashioned HTML hand coded or script generated by myself. https allows browsers like Chrome to regard the site as "secure" (not that there's really anything to protect here!) and I was looking for a solution which wrapped all that up, including properly signed certificates, as cheaply as possible. I will look at the AWS CloudFront offering too, but I think Azure will let me do it more cheaply. I am using GoDaddy for hosting the two names in DNS, but their hosted website offerings weren't to my style. With my web sites as with my bowls I like the simple look! GoDaddy redirects are done via a little website rather than DNS which is why the AWS/Azure URL appears, which is naff, but I need to keep my outlay as small as possible here.
Lastly I need to give a shout out to https://simplecss.org/ for providing a useful set of style sheets which let me get on with making the content while giving a decent look on mobile and laptop.