FOR Vale craftsman Ray Key, the first weekend of October is another busy working one - but this time he will be working in full view of thousands of others.

As president of the Association of Woodturners of Great Britain, he has a major part to play at the International Woodworking and Turning Exhibition at Birmingham's National Exhibition Centre (October 5-7).

While there, he will be one of many craftsmen displaying their skills and years of experience at demonstrations during the event. He is one of the most experienced woodturners in the country and has been turning bits of dead tree into works of art and beautiful decorative pieces for three decades now.

"I was in the engineering business and there was a lot of turning involved in that job. It stayed with me," he explained.

"I worked for Chrysler in Coventry for eight years in their styling studios and all the time I was there I was turning wood as a hobby and then it became a job really."

For many years, he and his wife, Liz, ran a craft shop in Vine Street in Evesham selling his work but, for the last 14 years, they have been living in Bretforton, where Mr Key also works. Woodturning is easily defined - "It is using a lathe, basically," explained Mr Key. "It is the equivalent of the potter's wheel."

In the past many items, such as stair banisters and balustrades were hand-crafted by wood turners but most of that work is now done by machine. Mr Key's own work falls into two areas: making high-quality platters and bowls for sale in shops such as Conran in London, and crafting purely decorative pieces and objects, such as small boxes, in unsuals or exotic woods, for galleries.

"I used to do a lot of domestic utility woodware, but I stopped in 1985," he said, explaining that it was hard to compete with much cheaper products imported from Third World countries.

He does not specialise in any particular wood, saying: "Most woods are turnable but some you would never want to turn again and some you would want to turn every day. I only use hard woods." His favourite is masur birch, which grows in the Baltic countries, but Mr Key said: "I use as much ash and sycamore as anything else."

Sycamore, he said, was the traditional wood for products used in food production, such as butter churns, because it didn't taint the food in any way.

No-one is quite sure how many woodturners there are in Britain. The Association of Woodturners of Great Britain has about 2,700 members and Mr Key believes there could be as many as 7,000 nationally, although most do it only as a hobby. There are probably no more than 300 who are full-time professionals. Many turners are older people who have taken to the craft in retirement, but Mr Key, himself aged 59, said: "Fortunately there are some younger people coming into it, which is encouraging."

A lot of his own work goes to America and earlier this year he became the first non-American to be awarded the American Association of Woodturners lifetime award. He is a regular visitor to America, lecturing and giving seminars and workshops and his travels have also taken him across much of the rest of the world, from France and other European countries to Australia and New Zealand.