The process of ebonizing wood is actually a fairly simple chemical reaction.  Not to tempt the wrath of my high school chemistry teacher (thank you for putting up with me, Mr. Oyer) but it works something like this.  The vinegar breaks down the steel wool into something resembling a smelly rust.  Wood has some kind of compound in it called tannin, and oak has more tannin than most other types of wood.  When the tannin is exposed to the rust, it causes the wood to turn jet black.

I took a piece of oak, stood it up in the vacuum chamber, then added the fluid until about a third of the wood was submerged.  Then I turned on the vacuum, hoping the pressure would draw the ebonizing fluid up, through the grain of the wood, resulting in a vase that was black at the top with lines of black “flowing” down toward the bottom.  What a great plan!  After about a week, you could see the blackness had come all the way through the wood, so I figured it must be as done as it needed to be.  When I started turning it, ALL of the darkness turned away and it looked like a simple, oak vase.  Bummer!  I hollowed out the vase about halfway down (to make it thinner) and stuck it back in the juice for three days, then left it under pressure for another three days.  It’s in the kiln drying now, so I should have a final product pretty soon.

After a couple days of drying, I couldn’t wait anymore and did the final turning.  WOW!  I really like the way the black came through what would normally have been a plain, blonde looking piece of oak.

After ebonizing the piece of cedar, I suddenly had the urge to see what the process would do to other kinds of wood.  I found the last piece of willow that I had in the shop.  Willow is either the easiest wood to turn that yeilds a pattern kinda like an ambrosia maple, or it’s an absolutely nasty, chippy, cracky, punky, poor excuse for firewood.

I tossed it in the pot, added the fluid and put it under pressure.  After three days, it too looked like a lump of charcoal.  After a week in the kiln, I took it down to the shop and started turning.  Turns out that willow doesn’t really suck up the ebonizing fluid like I thought it would, so I put it back in the vacuum chamber, let it soak for three days, then left it for another three days under pressure.  When I re-turned it, I realized the color had indeed gone through the rest of the blank.  That was the good news.  The bad news was that a series of cracks developed on one side of the bowl that my mentor said was “un-fixable”.  I was left with designer firewood.

After staring at the piece for a couple of days, I decided to mix up some black epoxy putty and fill the holes.  At worst, the piece would fly apart on the lathe at some point, but that could be fixed by wearing a face mask and being a little less aggressive with my cuts.  At best, I’d end with a piece that showed off the sudden color changes, with the filled cracks “blending in” with the overall look of the bowl.

Here’s what came out of the process.  I’m extremely pleased with this one!  Not enough to go looking for another chunk of willow to turn, but enough to start looking for more wood that can be ebonized and turned.

When my first daughter gave birth to my first grandchild, the theme for her baby shower was chevrons.  I figured out how to make a segmented bowl with a chevron pattern that could be used to hold cards for the gift table.  I was pretty pleased with the final product, then figured I’d customize it a bit to make it personal.  I carved out my grandson’s name in the bottom, inlaid it with ebonized walnut dust, and just because, I burned a little message to my unborn grandson on the bottom.  Alexa loved it!  My grandson has it now and plays with it to hold the wooden Easter eggs I turned for him.  Well, that started a tradition…

When my second daughter had my second grandchild, one of the first questions was “When will she get her bowl”?  Apparently, it was now a foregone conclusion that was going to happen.  The first problem is that my daughter wouldn’t name the baby until she came out.  Her logic:  “I don’t want to name her Sofia if she comes out and doesn’t look like a Sofia”.  Guess you can’t argue with a mother’s logic.  The second problem was that Megan had the baby at the worst possible time for me to get any work done in the shop, because of a whole host of other things all competing for time.  When I told her it might be awhile, she said “no problem, dad, I know you’re really busy”, but those big, sad, eyes said “my baby needs something you made just for her, too”.  It has always been hard to argue with those eyes.

So now, a month or so after the birth, the bowl is finished.  Like James’ bowl, this one also has her name inlaid in the bottom and a message on the bottom.  Since this one was made after the birthday, I went ahead and put her birthday by her name, too.  The material used for the pink inlay is colored epoxy putty.  Even though Megan was adamant that her daughter wasn’t going to be forced to wear pink everyday, the color looks great with her head full of dark black hair and the pink color actually matches the color of the first hair bow she wore.  Very happy with the way this turned out.

Now to start thinking about the bowl for my third grandchild…

I was cleaning some stuff up in the garage and came across a cedar bowl that I had started to turn at least 5 years ago when I was still very, very new and bad at turning.  I know it was that long ago, because the shape is absolutely horrendous and I remember getting a nasty catch while the wood was spinning.  The sudden catch is like sticking a broom handle in the spokes of a bike:  something’s gonna break and something’s gonna go flying.  In this case, the tenon (the part of the wood that the lathe holds on to) is what broke.  The actual bowl was the part that went flying, right over my left shoulder, past my ear, and landed somewhere near the back of the garage.  Now, as I looked at the half-turned piece of wood, I decided to use it as a “test piece” for an idea that had been knocking around my brain.  I submerged the wood in ebonizing fluid (steel wool, dissolved in vinegar), put it in the vacuum chamber, and left it sit under pressure for a couple of days.  When it came out, it looked like a lump of charcoal!  As I turned it, though, the rich reddish color of the cedar came out, but all of the white sapwood had retained the dark black color.

Here’s the final product.  the shape is still a terrible cross between an ashtray and an upside down hat from the 50’s, but I really like what the ebonizing fluid did to the wood.

From time to time we have large implementations at work.  These types of things usually start at midnight on Saturday, and go until some time Sunday, late morning or the afternoon if there are issues.  Starting around 3:00 am, a series of conference calls start every hour on the hour to get a status of the effort and address any concerns that are happening.  That means pretty much all night, there’s 15 minutes of work, followed by 45 minutes of waiting.  During the down time, I usually go to the shop and work on something, just to stay awake and alert.

I was looking around for something to turn and found a piece oak that had a burl that had grown on one side of the wood.  A burl is like a wart on a tree, and inside the burl, the wood gets really confused on how it’s supposed to grow, so it usually has a combination of swirly grain and bits of bark that get trapped as the tree makes the irregular growth.  I figured I’d spin it up and see what it looks like.  This is the final product, about 4″ across and three inches tall.

This is the side that had the “normal” wood.

This is the side that had the burl growing.

Hats off to the brave!

Awhile back, one of my daughters posted the story on her Facebook wall about the Stanford University swimmer, who was in the process of raping a woman, when two men who happened to be walking past, noticed what was happening and decided to act.  These two heroes drug him off of her and held him until the police showed up.  Unless you live under a rock, you’ve most likely heard of the case.  On the off chance that someone hasn’t, the rapist was a pre-Olympic caliber swimmer, named Brock Turner.  For his crime, he  was given an extremely light sentence by a judge, who didn’t want this elite athlete’s life to be permanently ruined by a harsh sentence.  After all, he had a bright future ahead of him!  No apparent thought was given to the victim and the bright future she had ahead of her, at least before being raped behind a dumpster.  Poor little Brock had to serve his 6 months in a county jail instead of prison (got out in three) and is now living with his parents in Ohio, where he has the nerve to complain about being label as a sex offender and that his reputation has been forever tarnished.  Apparently, he’s just now realizing that people don’t like rapists, regardless of how fast you can swim.  (Side note, we also don’t like people who lie to the world during the Olympics, regardless of how fast you can swim.)  The judge (Aaron Persky) was facing a petition to be kicked off the bench, but elected to move to hear civil cases instead, as if he was going to be any less of a douche lord while sitting on a different bench ruining even more lives with his ridiculous rulings.  There’s still an effort to get rid of him, so maybe karma will win out in the end.  The California congress took up a review of the sentencing laws and like most politicians in an election year, are promising action!  Yeah, right!

What’s interesting about this whole story is that no one would have ever heard about this whole sorry nightmare had it not been for the victim.  She wrote a victim’s impact statement, read it (in vain) at the trial, then posted it online after the embarrassingly light sentence was administered.  It is one of the most powerful statements I have ever read.  When it went viral, accompanied by knowledge of how light his sentence had been, people started to act.  If you haven’t read it, Google it, then go hug your daughters!

Today, I read another story about a woman who claims to have been raped by a member of the North Carolina football team, back in February.  Guess what?  Even though she reported the rape the night that it happened, submitted to a rape kit, and cooperated with authorities from both the police department and the university, the university hasn’t done anything, other than say they’re not moving forward with charges.   Since it happened on campus, the university has jurisdiction and has decided not to refer the incident to the real police.  Their main hang up with her story?  Apparently, in their minds, there is a difference between being “incapacitated” and “black out drunk”.  One is rape, the other is just – well – the fault of the victim for drinking too much at a college party that’s attended by young, strapping male football players.   The victim got fed up with a lack of action by the university, so she filed two “citizen warrants” for misdemeanor changes against the rapist and held a press conference!  At the press conference, she laid out just how many ways the system has re-victimized her (the university never even offered her any kind of counseling), all the while treating the star athlete with respect and sympathy.  The university investigators did their initial questioning of the rapist with his best friend in the room, who just happened to be a material witness providing the alibi, so they could make sure their stories matched.  At one point, the investigators told the rapist not to worry.  Now that the story is getting spread, the university has said they would be willing to revisit their stance, AFTER they find out what her blood alcohol level was, by processing the rape kit that is still sitting in a lab somewhere. They’re still trying to find some way to blame the victim.  Meanwhile, the poor, picked on football player surrendered to police after the press conference and has apparently been suspended from the team.  Time will tell if the story goes viral, or at least viral enough to put pressure on the university.

In our own town, a “serial child molester” and his team of hired thug attorneys was able to get his trial delayed for three years after being arrested.  All of the girls he molested testified in open court to years of abuse, only to be savaged by his Chicago attorney.  Didn’t matter.  Thanks to the unwavering strength of the girls, he was found guilty on all counts.  Then the thug attorneys did what they were paid to do and got the sentencing delayed for another seven months after the jury found him guilty on all counts.  When his day to be sentenced finally happened, each of his victims spoke at the sentencing hearing and gave statements that literally made grown men sitting in the courtroom tear up.   Well, except for the serial child molester.  He was only crying about how unfair it was to punish an old, widowed man, who had health problems, was formerly in the military, and wouldn’t be allowed to spend special quiet time alone with his 5 year old great-grand-daughter anymore.  The judge sentenced him to prison, which sounds good, but like the rapist Brock, he was given 3 and a half years for each count, to be served concurrently, even though he had been molesting young girls for over 20 years.  That’s less than a year per victim, without even factoring in how shortened his sentence will be for “good behavior”.

Sadly, these kinds of stories aren’t uncommon. We, as a society, keep passing stronger and stronger laws to punish sex crimes, but then we allow the system to brutalize those who come forward so viciously that many victims won’t put themselves under that kind of pressure and scrutiny.  Those who do come forward, expecting “justice”, suddenly find themselves being investigated in the center of a full on “victim shaming” attack.

What good are strong laws if the crimes never actually get reported or prosecuted?  We need to recognize the courage it took for each of the victims to come forward.  The bravery it took to stand their ground, face their accusers, withstand the onslaught of slimy defense attorneys (especially those from Chicago) and still walk away with their head held high.  In each of the cases cited above, the victims refused to quit.  They refused to be silent.  They refused to just accept the notion that what happened to them could somehow be excused away, blamed on them, or marginalized.  They also refused to let the crimes define who they are as a person.  They’re better than that.

That kind of strength deserves more from “the system” than what they’ve been given!