I found a natural edge bowl that I had started and set aside.  I think it is willow.  I remember turning it when it was very wet and setting it aside to let it finish drying.  To my surprise, it barely warped and only had a teeny tiny crack in one part that was easily fixed.  The final thickness ended up being about 1/8″.  Not too bad!

The more I look at it, though, it looks awful white and awful plain.  Perhaps it needs a little color.  Hum…  what to do with it now…

Many months ago, I had an odd shaped piece of red oak and decided to see what I could make out of it.  It turned (no pun intended) into a vase.  Oak is not my favorite wood to turn, but I was pleased with the shape, so I kept it out of the burn pile, set it aside, and figured at some point I’d finish it.

A Month or so ago, I decided to add some color to it.  Since it was red oak, I thought I’d dye it red and see what I got.  I filled the vacuum chamber with red dye and left it under pressure for three or four days.  When I pulled it out, it looked like a really dark red.  PERFECT!  I let it dry for a couple days, then put it back on the lathe and figured I’d sand it smooth, since the dye raised the grain.  After a couple minutes sanding, it became clear that the dye barely went into the wood.  Back to the drawing board…

Since the vacuum chamber was a bust, I decided to see what the pressure pot would do.  I filled the inside of the vase with dye, then put it under pressure.  After the first day, the dye level was down about an inch, so I figured I’d just keep it under pressure until I could see the dye coming through the outside of the vase.  Each day for a week, I checked the dye level and topped it off.  After a full week, I took it out of the pressure pot and let it dry.

Below is what I ended with after another round of sanding.  I was hoping that the dye would have been more “stripey”, only coming through between the growth rings, but I think I like the way this turned out.  Makes me wonder what I could get with a lighter wood like maple or sycamore.  Hum…

I really hate turning pine!  It’s right up there with using public port-a-potties in August, dealing with car salesmen on a trade in, and every single interaction I’ve ever had with the family court system. Yeah, things may turn out OK in the end, but the process you have to go through is absolute misery.  If pine is kiln dried, the heat will dry up the pine and it’s not too bad to work with .  For woodturning, the wood is air dried so it’s not as hard, which means that the resin in the pine is still fairly fluid.  “fairly fluid” = sticky mess!  It sticks to your tools, it gums up your hands, cakes sandpaper almost instantly, and leaves a huge mess on the lathe to clean up.  Yeah, it makes the shop smell like someone just committed a homicide on a Christmas tree, but the wood itself is horrible to work with.  The end grain is prone to tearing, so you have to constantly sharpen the tools, take really small cuts, and keep the lathe spinning at a very fast speed.  Usually, once you finish a project, the grain pattern is really, really bland!  I’m convinced this is why it’s used for construction lumber, so it can be covered up and never seen again by anyone.

My former boss gave me some big chunks of pine as a bonus to some walnut he had to get rid of.  Here’s  a picture of what it started out looking like.  All that greasy looking white stuff is the pine resin that seeped out when I split the wood, then dried.

After a full afternoon of swearing, I managed to turn a bowl out of this stuff that really wasn’t that bad in terms of size and shape.  The pine had discolored for some reason, so it was  less bland than I had expected, especially on the inside of the bowl.  Still, there were some rough spots on the outside of the bowl where the wood grain just refused to cooperate with the gouge, so I needed to do something to hide what I couldn’t correct.  I decided to fill all of the tear outs with CA glue and sawdust, then sand it down to be smooth.  Then, I painted the whole outside black to cover the patch job and applied the “cosmic cloud” colors.  All things considered, this one turned out pretty good!  I’m still getting the hang of the coloring process, but I think I’ve finally found something that makes the painful process of turning pine worth it.