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Bowls / Woodturning / Woodworking — 2 Comments
05
May 21

Flamed Olive Ash

I have a few blanks of olive ash I got from Home of Wood back before Brexit made a hames of shipping stuff from the UK to here, and they can be a bit of a pain to turn because they’re so hard, but they always make up for it by looking spectacular. So…

Some really lovely grain right on the corner where it’ll be turned away. Le sigh. Also an odd crack that I’d circled in pencil there and a void on the far side. This wood really doesn’t want to make your life simple. I wanted a shape that fitted in the hand well, and wound up going down the amphora road a bit again. I’m not sure this really works that well, but for some reason I keep on cutting it.

Hollowing out that shape is a bit of a pain because of the undercut being half-way into the bowl. But at least the nice bit of grain that I liked is still present.

Also, wow, that figuring. That’s going to look spectacular when it’s done. Assuming I don’t muck it up. So, sanded to 220 dry, to 400 with danish oil, then yorkshire grit and then four coats of hampshire sheen wax, each left for ten minutes to set up before being buffed.

The grain came out nice but it’s the figuring that’s the star here.

I’m guess this must have been from under where the branch was and this is all stress-related figuring but it’s really pretty.
So, reverse the bowl and hollow out, which went well but was a lot of small cuts and grumbling about tearout in odd spots and stress cracks opening up. I really need to get a bottom feeder bowl gouge to handle that transition from side to base and to do a bottom cut rather than a scrape. But it turned out okay. Poppyseed oil and hampshire sheen for the inside so it’s foodsafe.

Then reversed the bowl onto a pushplate and shaped the foot and a bit more danish oil and wax there.

Totally forgot to brand it, I’ll do that later on. For now, it’s done and it fits in the hand well and it’s pretty, so I call that a success.

Bowls / Woodturning / Woodworking — No Comments
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 🙂

Woodturning / Woodworking — No Comments
09
Apr 20

First bowl!

So the woodturning course I was taking was cancelled because of Covid19 before we got to the bowl turning part of the course. But I had a large variety sack of bowl blanks arrive from homeofwood.co.uk at the start of lockdown, and I’ve been wanting to try bowl turning for a while, so I read about a dozen books on bowlturning (like The Practical Woodturner and others), bingewatched about thirty hours of youtube intruction from a dozen different turners, set the pucker factor to maximum and picked out the smallest minature blank I had…

That’s a three-inch blank on a three-inch faceplate 😀 But we can still do more overkill…

Tailstock support on a three inch blank 😀 Well, first bowl, might as well do belt and braces. So I turned the tenon (and it didn’t look too bad I thought), then I took off the faceplate, chucked the blank up, realised I’d skipped a step, put the faceplate back on and turned the outside of the bowl.

I didn’t have any plan for the shape by the way, that was just something that felt right as I was doing it. Then I took off the faceplate and chucked it up and immediately found that the chuck itself was vibrating because the tenon wasn’t exactly central. A quick pass or two with the spindle gouge cured that, and then I started hollowing out the bowl with the bowl gouge and quickly discovered a few things:

  • I need a lamp in the corner of the shed pointed at the headstock. I had to jury-rig a torch to be able to see inside the bowl to see what I was doing. Daylight might help, but this was after dark here.
  • I really need to remove the tailstock to do this, it’s way too scary having your hands near a live center when worrying about catches in a bowl.
  • Being able to rotate the lathe stand in the shed would be a major bonus on any larger bowls. Happily it’s not bolted to the floor; less happily, the compressor and pillar drill would have to be moved which is awkward. Maybe I could put a shelf down at the feet of the lathe stand when I can get more plywood after the lockdown ends.
  • Bowl turning is a bit scary.

But after a while of taking small bites with the bowl gouge and then a final scraper pass, I was able to move on to sanding. Up from 120 to 400 grit, and then burnishing with a handfull of shavings – and doing that inside a bowl with just two fingers at high rpms is hilariously scary. I wanted to keep the colour light so I gave the bowl a coat of poppy seed oil (also food-safe, which is nice because I think this would make a good salt bowl).

And then a single coat of blonde shellac and I called it finished.

I’m rather pleased with that 🙂
I mean, the walls are too thick to be elegant and too uneven in thickness to be able to call the thickness a design choice, and I didn’t even get the bottom of the screw holes from the faceplate out of the rim, but for a first bowl, I’m happy with that 🙂

Now for that 11 inch by 4 inch blank in the timber storage box…