“Easy” way to make a threaded box: At one of the carving club meetings, a guy brought in a sphere that he had cut in half, hollowed out, and then tried to put threaded PVC pieces into it so make is into a box. Really cool idea, except he left an uneven gap in the split after the two halves were put back together. My mentor/friend Bob and I looked at the piece and decided that between the two of us, we could fix that teeny, tiny, little problem.
So this past Saturday, we got the PVC pieces and started in on the project. We figured it would take one hour – tops – and we’d be done. Our Saturday session ended four hours later with nothing to really show for our work than a string of obscenities, cobbled together in unique patterns. Every time we tried to put the lid together, it would either end up with the same crooked crack that the other guy had, or the PVC fitting would come loose and break away from the wood.
Sunday, we decided that we had come too far to quit, so we went back at it. We finally realized that the reason for the crooked gap was because the lid was that as the threads locked, it would “tilt” the lid to the same angle as the threads. Closer examination showed that we had set the insert on a little “shelf” we had left in the lid, but since it was sitting on the bottom thread, it was tipping the lid to one side. We figured out how to set the PVC insert in flat and solved that little problem. To solve the problem of getting the PVC to stick to the wood, we used CA glue to glue the insert to the wood, then we used plumber’s epoxy to fill the small space around where the fitting attached to the box lid. One of those two changes worked and we were able to complete the project. Not too shabby, considering all we had to go through to make this little buggar!
Still some finish work to do on the underside of the lid.PVC Box side view
Colored Epoxy: So about 5 years ago when I started turning, I was cutting up firewood and saved a small slab of cherry that looked like someday it could be turned into something kinda neat. There was a branch that was wrapping around the trunk of the cherry tree, and the small bit that I saved had a cross section of both the trunk and the side branch. I finally decided to tackle the project, because it seemed so simple: Fill the void with something, then turn it into a shallow bowl. What could go wrong?
I decided to use clear epoxy, mixed with blue chalk to make a bright blue inlay between the two separate pieces of wood. I quickly learned two things. First, without a vacuum chamber or some kind of pressure cooker kind of thing, when filling in a void that deep there is absolutely no place for the air bubbles to go. The end result is that once I started turning, the air bubbles would be exposed and look really bad. It ended up taking multiple “mix and fill” sessions, each requiring the piece to wait overnight, before I could finish the bowl. Second, I learned that trying to keep epoxy from running all of the place when the crack is on a round surface is pretty much impossible. The mess created by all the dripping and spills was a constant struggle. In the end, this is what I ended up with. DEFINITELY worth the effort, I think!
George Brett would be proud! So a friend of mine told me there was a big tree trunk that someone had cut down and rolled out to the curb, just after the last big snow that we had. From the drive-by viewing that he did, he thought it looked like walnut and suggested that I may want to pick it up. Free walnut? Hells yeah! My intention was to swing by on my way home from work that night and pick it up. I didn’t get out as quickly as I had planned, so by the time I drove by the place, it was dark enough the streetlights were on, everyone else was settled into their dinner routines and the street was empty. I immediately saw the cache of wood consisted of a big, long chunk sitting right on the curb, and a shorter but wider piece that was half buried in snow. I popped the back and prepared to muscle the longer piece into the suburban. That’s when I realized it wasn’t walnut, it was pine. Not a good pine like a southern yellow pine, but the deep red pine that comes from evergreen trees that really serve no purpose except to make people trying to mow around them itch. Since I already had it out in the street, I figured I was committed and finished the loading. I hated that log! Being freshly cut, it was oozing sap everywhere and since it had been sitting in a snow bank, it was waterlogged and heavy. Lovely!
Today, that little voice in my head said “maybe you’re being too harsh. Surely it can’t be as bad as you’re imagining! Cut up the tree trunk and see what you get.” I listened and decided to split the log and see what I was working with. Here’s what the middle of that log looked like:
ICK!!!
The stuff that looks like congealed hamburger grease is actually the resin from the pine tree. That’s the part of a pine tree that makes houses burn really hot, really fast, and this tree had an excessive amount. This crap sticks to everything, leaves everything that touches it smelling like pine and pretty much just gums up the works. When I figure out how to get a bowl blank cut from the log without getting that gunk all over my saw and tools, I’ll turn something, even if it’s just to punish the tree for making my friend fall for it’s walnut tree impersonation. Next time I hear that little voice, I think I’m going to seek professional help…
The Puffin Bowl: At least two years ago, a woman I work with said she had a really big tree in her backyard that she was going to call “the tree people” to cut down. She asked if I wanted any of the wood. (DUH!) I said yes and offered to help cut it up. Well, time went by, and kept going by, and weeks turned to months, months to over a year, and finally last fall she said the tree was on the ground. She thought it was a maple tree, but wasn’t sure, and that I could have as much as I wanted, because it was just going to be firewood. I had to excuse myself to wipe the drool off my chin…
When I got to her house, there was indeed a tree laying across her backyard. From the driveway, it looked like a big ‘ol tree. When I got close, I realized four things. First, this thing was massive! The blade on my chainsaw is 26″ and the base of the tree was about twice that wide. Second, it was not a maple tree, but a red oak tree. Having never turned red oak (only white oak) I figured this would be something new to try and quietly thanked the wood gods for my good fortune. Third, this tree had been completely abused by Mother Nature! The bottom 20 feet or so was rotted away about halfway through the width of the tree. It’s amazing that it was even standing and hadn’t decided to come down on it’s own. Over the years, the rotted part had allowed water to seep in, causing cracks and rot to move up the tree another 20 feet or so, so I was pretty sure most of the wood from the main trunk would be unusable for turning. Luckily, the limbs on this thing were thicker than most tree trunks, so there would be plenty of wood to cart home. The main thing that struck me, however, was that this tree had to have been old. Like over 100 years old, old. Not to sound like a granola-eating-hippie-tree-hugger, but it was actually kinda sad to see a tree that had been standing that long, had withstood so many storms, and had witnessed so much history, reduced to such an inglorious ending as becoming a bonfire. As we worked on the tree, Lisa, her husband Jeff, and one of their sons talked about their history with the tree. I heard about the tree house they built next to it, the way the kids played on and around it, the “things” the prior owners had done to it <insert ominous shudder here>… I felt like it was some distant cousin to their family was literally being cut out of the family tree. When that feeling passed, I grabbed as many pieces as would comfortably fit in the back of the Suburban and headed home to seal the ends until I could turn the logs into bowl blanks.
A couple weeks later, I took two of the bowl blanks to a friend’s house because my little lathe dosen’t have the oomph to spin that much wet, heavy, wood. When we started spinning the logs, it was so wet a mixture of water, sap, and general liquid ickiness was literally flying out of the wood, soaking my shirt and leaving trails across his shop ceiling. It also smelled bad. No, it stank! Bad! Like worse than a closing time at the daycare nursery after all the babies had spent the day suffering from some kind of intestinal virus kind of bad. I came home with an immediate need for a washing machine and a shower, but I had two roughed out bowls, both about 14″ across and a good 7-8 inches high. I sealed the wood again and left them to dry.
Late last month, when I checked up on them, I noticed HUGE cracks had formed in them while they dried. A couple years ago, i would have accepted the loss and thrown them into the burn pile, but these days I’m not so willing to give up. I got the bright idea of filling the cracks with gold colored epoxy, thinking it would seal the cracks, glue the wood back together and looks like some kind of exotic sap had been captured in the wood. Visions of Jurassic Park mosquitoes frozen in chunks of amber was the look I would go for.
Reality is a harsh master!
Filling cracks on a round object is next to impossible! I had to mix up tiny amounts of epoxy, then somehow get it into the cracks without leaking all over the place, then let it dry overnight before moving on to the next crack. Oh, and epoxy forms air bubbles if you do it wrong, and if there were bubbles in the dried epoxy the next morning, the epoxy had to be carved out so another layer could be added to fill the bubbles, which meant another day of waiting. When I was finished with all the epoxy work, I took the now sealed bowl back to Bob’s for final turning and prepared myself to gloat over how good the gold would look as it started to shine through the cracks and accept the heartfelt praise and awe that Bob would be powerless to withhold.
Yeah… Well… That didn’t happen!
Only two of the cracks were wide enough to allow for all the gold metallic coloring mixed into the epoxy to actually look like shiny gold, and there were still air bubbles that could be seen. To salvage the project, Bob had some red oak colored wood putty, which we used to cover over most of the cracks and bad epoxy. We also uncovered another issue with the bowl. As we removed wood from the inside of the bowl, and small brown line in the wood started getting bigger and bigger. By the time we got the bowl down to its final thickness, we were staring at an irregular shaped hole in the bowl about the size of a pencil eraser where many, many years ago a little piece of tree limb had started to grow, then rotted away, leaving a void. Bob said it looked like a duck, I thought it was a spot on vision of a puffin. We filled that hole with CA glue and bright blue chalk to add contrast, then re-finished the sanding.
Below if what we came up with. I gave it to Lisa today, since I had promised her something from the wood that I took and she absolutely loved it. Made me smile, knowing that piece of the old tree will have a much better ending than a bonfire!
