Bowls / Woodturning / Woodworking — 2 comments
03
May 21

Thin walls

So I’d been working on the shape of the bowls I was turning and trying to get the basics down, and a friend who’s been turning a lot longer than I have (hi Tom!) suggested a skill test – turn a thin-walled bowl. I managed to do that on two of my first bowls but I’d not turned anything with thin walls since.

So, trying again a year later with a small chestnut blank.

Nice simple open shape for this, no closed bowls or hollow forms just yet 😀

Using a tenon below the foot because the blank just seemed a few millimetres thick.

Sanded, oiled (just a coat of danish oil), yorkshire grit and hampshire sheen wax. Not doing anything very special because at this point, I expect it to explode mid-hollowing 😀

Reverse it into the chuck, face it off.

And now it gets hairy. Tom’s advised technique was to hollow out the top centimetre to the desired thickness, make all my finishing cuts for that centimeter, then do the next centimetre down (instead of roughly hollowing the whole bowl and then doing a finishing cut, because the bowl would be so thin that it would flex on the lathe, and the risk of a catastrophic catch gets much much higher.

First cm went okay…

Second cm was okay, starting to get stressed….

Third cm down, now just dreading a catch out of nowhere and a ruined bowl. Squeaky bum time. One last cm to go…

And it didn’t explode and I’m rather surprised to be honest. There are tool marks to remove and two high ridges (the pencil lines there mark them) to take care of:

And that’s ready for sanding.

Just over 2mm before sanding at the rim. And the depth was okay as well.

Sanded with poppyseed oil to 320 inside the bowl and hampshire wax to make it look nice:

And then reverse it again and use a push-plate to remove the tenon and shape the foot.

I can’t really get in any further than that even with my finest detail gouge so I carve off the little stub with a chisel.

And a bit of sanding and branding…

And that’s that. One skill test, done. I’ll have to keep practicing this, and a bit more regularly. But it’s nice to know I can do it at all…

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16
Apr 21

Damn dinosaurs

Was watching Conkers Live this week and Stewart Furini was demonstrating spiralling and texturing (something I’d like to have tooling to do more of…) but at one point during the demo, he’d finished some spiralling and had painted and sanded back the piece and this was the result:

It was quite striking at the time and reminded me of something and it took a few minutes to place it:

I don’t have a spiralling tool but I do have carving tools. So I grabbed a blank…

It’s an odd shape, you’re looking at the bottom of the bowl here – I wanted it to fit my hand and to be a little closed over (turned out, it’s a lot closed over). Printed out the scratch marks from a jpg on the web…

Cut those out with a sharp knife, then put cellotape over the sheet and stuck it to the blank, then cut along the edges of the scratches through the cellotape and tidied up afterwards.

Then out with the v-tool gouges and a 5mm straight chisel and the sharp knife and I carved out the scratches.

Next up, ebonising lacquer.

Might have overdone that a little 😀 Worse, didn’t seal the wood first, so after sanding back…

That bleeding of the lacquer couldn’t be sanded away, it’s in there too deeply. In the end, I had to take the gouge to it again, cut the surface back by a millimeter or so, re-sand to 180, re-carve the scratches and then seal the surface and gave the area round the scratches two more coats of sealer, then masked off the area and ebonising lacquer again:

And then sanded back and this time it didn’t look bad so I hollowed it out (and going by the screaming noises I either need to get better tools for this or just get gud scrub), then flipped it over and used the push plate to tidy up the foot. Few coats of danish oil, some yorkshire grit and then a final coat of hampshire sheen wax got added along the way.

I kinda like it 😀

Bowls / Woodturning / Woodworking — Leave a comment
15
Apr 21

Just something simple

Was just in the mood to turn something small and simple. A little chestnut bowl that fits well into the hand. I like the shape, I must remember to keep things simple more often 🙂 Sanded to 320 (with poppyseed oil for the 320), then a coat or two of poppyseed oil all over, and on the outside yorkshire grit ordinary and microfine and then a coat of hampshire sheen wax. It’s just the right size to put snacks in for watching woodturning youtube 🙂

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