Over the past few months, I’ve been working on this plate. It’s made from sweet gum that a friend sent me. I started with a piece that was roughly 12 inches square (300mm) by 3 inches thick (75mm). I finished with a plate that is just under 12 inches in diameter, and about an inch thick, and which isn’t quite flat. Sweet gum moves a lot as it dries, and I didn’t account for this movement in my initial turning.

The thickness of the plate itself is under a quarter inch (6mm), probably closer to ⅛ inch at the thinnest spot, but I don’t have a caliper that can measure it accurately.

But I think the plate is finally done. The finish is tung oil and shellac, applied by french polishing, after a number of initial coats of oil. It’s food safe, but I don’t know that anyone will ever eat from this plate.

In my numbering of turned bowls, this is number 48.

This plate was large enough that I needed to turn the head of my lathe and work with the plate parallel to the ways of the lathe, rather than the usual perpendicular arrangement.

#bowl #plate #sweetGum

Discuss... Or contact me in the fediverse @davepolaschek@woodworking.group

A friend of mine in Virginia sent me some wood recently, which included a blank of “definitely not mulberry,” which he had picked up somewhere. It had pretty grain, but he hasn’t been turning a lot of bowls lately, so he passed it along to me.

It took me a few days to find the right shape for the bowl within the blank. I started by getting it close, but with ½ inch thick walls, and then staring at it while I figured out what shape it needed to be.

Once I decided that I wanted a defined rim on the bowl, I finished thinning the walls (to a little under ⅜ inch, or 9mm), mostly hollowing them from the inside, though cutting the rim from the outside. I had a tiny bit of chip-out right near the transition from heartwood to sapwood, but decide to leave it, rather than removing the rim I’d made, which is a good feature of the bowl.

Finish is a couple coats of tung oil, some shellac, and Ack’s Finishing Paste. The bowl is about 7 inches in diameter, and 4½ inches tall.

I’m pretty happy with this one, and my sweetie thinks it’s a “keeper,” which means we need to find a place to display it. I guess there are worse problems to have.

#woodworking #woodturning #bowl

Discuss... Or contact me in the fediverse @davepolaschek@woodworking.group

My second bowl made from cholla wood and epoxy, with blue, green, yellow and red tints in the epoxy. The blue is darker than I intended, almost a black, but I think overall it works.

Sold as part of a fundraising auction to support MetaFilter.

#bowl #cholla #epoxy #woodworking #woodturning

Discuss... Or contact me in the fediverse @davepolaschek@woodworking.group

This is a bowl I made from cholla and red-tinted epoxy. It’s about 8 inches in diameter and about 5 inches high. The cholla was collected in our yard near Eldorado at Santa Fe, New Mexico.

#woodworking #bowl #cholla #epoxy

Discuss... Or contact me in the fediverse @davepolaschek@woodworking.group