The bowl was made from a crotch in a juniper tree with a large bark inclusion where the branch and trunk had partially grown together. Wacky grain, multiple different bits of heartwood, and all the sorts of things that make for a pretty result if you can keep the bowl from exploding on the lathe.

Finish was a few coats of Tried and True Varnish Oil, followed by Birchwood Casey TruOil gunstock finish which I used when the 24-hour wait for the T&T to cure felt like it was going to take forever.

I really like working with flawed wood like this and seeing what I can do with the wood and resin, but it was almost a month in progress, which feels like FOREVER when people keep asking, “is it done yet?”

Got the wall thickness down around ¼ inch (6 mm), but any thinner would have meant waiting even longer for the epoxy to cure and a hidden crack in the bottom of the bowl probably would’ve let go if I’d kept turning.

#bowl #woodTurning #resin #juniper

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Got some Russian olive from a friend last Saturday. This bowl came out of one of the pieces. There are two cracks that wanted to come apart as I was turning it, and the shape was largely dictated by another crack that did come apart (and which put a dent in the ceiling of my shop).

The lid was part of the chunk that came off. It had a branch near the middle that had rotted, so I filled that with epoxy and stuck on a handle turned from another offcut.

Mostly turned with a bowl gouge, but I also used a few scrapers, a carbide turning tool, a skew, and a bedan. Finished with homemade friction finish plus some wax.

#project #bowl #woodturning

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This was such a small chunk of wood (Gambel Oaks don’t grow very large, typically 1-2m tall around here) that rather than turn it round, I decided to carve an oblong bowl.

When my sweetie and I are talking about a collection of things, we’ll often refer to it as stuff and things to emphasize that it’s not just stuff. So when I looked at the flats at the ends of the bowl wondering what to carve there, stuff and things came to mind.

#bowl #woodCarving #oak

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I hadn’t known that chokecherry grew this big, but the finished bowl is 7½ inches across and 2½ inches tall. The tree was growing next to a bridge that crosses a creek between my friend’s place and his neighbor’s near Taos, NM, so it had plenty of water to grow here in our dry climate.

I’m glad I got it rough turned as quickly as I did, and then dried it slowly in a bag full of shavings. There’s one crack that opened up which I filled with sawdust and CA glue, but otherwise the bowl held together nicely, even though it warped quite a bit.

It’s finished with a coat of tung oil, which firmed up the punky bits of the wood, and then a hand-rubbed shellac and tung oil finish. Once cured, it will be food safe.

If I get offered more chokecherry for turning, you can bet I’ll say “yes!”

#woodturning #bowl #chokecherry

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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

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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

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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 #resin

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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 #resin

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