Over the course of a week, here are the other bowls I finished…
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Twin walnut bowls
My boss’s parents had a walnut tree that got struck by lightening. He asked if I wanted any of the wood. After I wiped a little drool off my chin, I said yes and made the customary deal: “you give me wood and I’ll give you a bowl”. Since this is my boss we’re talking about, I ended up making him two bowls, one from each side of the same log. He can pick one of the two to keep, then give the other one to his parents. Guess he could also keep them both and tell his parents I welshed on a deal. I’d never know… Anyway, here are the two that came out. Both are about 10 inches around, or so.
Mulberry Failure – SUCCESS!
Last month, I talked about a mulberry bowl that cracked so bad I didn’t think it could be salvaged. Luckily, I was wrong! This one actually turned out pretty good!
Q’s screwdriver
May 18th – Q’s screwdriver – I said earlier that my son was working on a screwdriver for his shop class at high school. He finally finished it and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. Q was VERY happy! He sanded it to 8000 grit, so it was as smooth as glass. The end is a piece of blue Corion tile that was polished to the point there are no tool marks in it. He took it to school to turn it in and the other kids in the class were pretty excited. Made him feel pretty good about what he had created. When he showed it to his teacher, his teacher said, “I’ll have to take a picture of it and then grade it later.” No “hey, this is pretty cool looking”. No “wow, you really must have spent some time to make this.” No “I’ve never liked you and I intend to hit you with my car someday.” Nothing… Hope he gets the ‘A’ he deserves, but I don’t have high hopes.
May club challenge
May 15th – Club challenge.
The woodturning club that I belong to has a “president’s challenge” at every meeting. A project is given, then the club members have two months to present a finished project to the club that fits the challenge. Being new to the club, I haven’t participated, yet. There are some people in the club that have been turning for 50+ years, several who are making serious money from selling their work, and some really creative people that I would actually call artists without feeling pretentious. Kind of intimidating to be a newb in a group like that! The last challenge was bottle stoppers, but I didn’t take one in. I was going to, but then I saw the work that was coming in, I had that sudden feeling of being unworthy. Kinda like being back in school when I was drawing stick men and Ted Nowlin was drawing photo-realistic pencil sketches of all three of Charlie’s Angles. The current challenge is to turn a flower. At the meeting last week, I was watching as the entrants came in. Several made tulips, which are pretty common and a few others made marigold-ish things that I’ve done in the past. To be honest, aside from the guy who made wooden roses from the shavings hand planed off of a 2×4, there wasn’t anything that really knocked my socks off. I figured the bar this month wasn’t all that high, so I could wade in.
The current challenge, to celebrate spring, is to turn a flower. At the meeting last week, I was watching as the entrants came in. Several made tulips, which are pretty common and a few others made marigold-ish things that I’ve done in the past, and several brought in creations that were an absolute failure. I have to admit, I secretly like the last group! To be honest, aside from the guy who made wooden roses from the shavings hand planed off of a 2×4, there wasn’t anything that really knocked my socks off. I figured the bar this month wasn’t all that high, so I could wade in.
Here’s my finished piece. I figure it’s not the best thing I’ve ever done, but it’s not so horrible that I’ll be asked to leave the club.
Getting the walnut edges on the pansies was a complete pain in the ass! There was supposed to be another flower, but as I was cutting the petals on the bandsaw, I found out I hadn’t glued the wood good enough. As I started to cut the pieces, they exploded into shrapnel! Since this is just for the club meeting, I figured I’d just pitch it in the fire when the meeting was over. Getting beaned in the forehead just reinforced the notion that a hot dog roast was on the menu for the night immediately following the next club meeting. The vase is a piece of lightly spalted maple that I made in literally 15 minutes. One of my daughters has now “claimed” it, so I’ll have to sneak it into the fire pit. Kids…
UPDATE: When I took this to the club meeting, it was actually VERY well received! The little vase was literally a throw away scrap of wood that took about 5 minutes to make, but people seemed to like the vase as much as the flowers. Go figure!
Might be genetics…
May 7th – Might be genetics…
My son is taking a woodworking class in high school and now that the school year is all but over, they are finally allowed to do something involving the lathe. The “official” project is to make a screwdriver, which in all reality, is pretty boring. Nothing like sparking an interest by having the kids do something really mundane, with only a scraper and 80 grit sandpaper to use for tools. Well, I’ll just say that’s a casualty of the public school system and try something at home. We can certainly do better than that.
I took my son to my friend/mentor’s shop for this introductory lesson. I figured Bob could stress the basics and since the message was coming from someone OTHER than me, the odds that he would actually listen had to be higher. He did pretty good! His first lesson was to turn a sweet potato. MUCH safer and more forgiving than wood and didn’t really make that big of a mess. Next was a piece of softer wood to practice making beads and coves. Q didn’t make any finished projects that night, but he did make a mess and lots of woodchips! When we got home, we decided to make something a little more “free form” that he could keep. What he came up with is a little cup made from a piece of plum. Not sure it has any practical use, but for a first piece, I think it turned out pretty good!
Mulberry failure
April 9 – The Mulberry failure! I have a standing offer with the people I work with. If they’re taking a tree down, I’ll help them cut it up in exchange for chunks of wood that I can turn. I also agree to make them something out of the wood that I collect. Everybody wins. They get free help to dispose of the tree AND some kind of memento from the tree to keep, which is apparently WAY cooler than I had thought it would be! I get a steady supply of wood to feed my addiction. A couple of months ago, a guy I work with told me that his father-in-law’s place got hit by the season’s last winter storm and the high winds took a tree down. He asked me if I would be interested in a Mulberry tree, that’s about 20″ across. Asking a wood turner if they want something like that is pretty much the same thing as asking someone who makes meth if they want a couple free cases of Sudafed. The cutting was easy, and I managed to score a carload of hefty logs that I cut in half, sealed the ends, and left to dry.
Mulberry, if you’ve never seen it while it’s still green, has two very distinctive properties. First, its a beautiful bright yellow color that I haven’t seen in other domestic woods. It reminds me a lot of an exotic wood called yellowheart. Over time, it will change into a yellowish brown color, but it’s still very pretty, with a clear grain pattern! Second, it holds moisture like a sponge! Since my little lathe doesn’t have the horsepower to spin something that heavy, I took it to a friend’s house to rough out the shape so it could finish drying. As the wood spun, it literally had water flying out of it to the point it leaves your shirt damp. It will also cause rust to form on the lathe where ever it sits, so we had to make sure we had everything dusted off when we were finished. Here’s a picture of the wood, before we started to turn it into a bowl.
When I got home, I put the roughed out bowl in my makeshift kiln to dry at about 105-110 degrees, and figured after a couple of weeks I’d be ready to finish the project. That was Friday. Today (Sunday) I checked the progress and realized that Mulberry has another very distinct property: It doesn’t like to be dried in a kiln! This is what it looks like now, and it’s still nowhere close to dry enough to finish turn.
Each of those black lines radiating out from the top of the bowl is a crack and the other side of the bowl looks just as bad. Since it’s not done drying, the cracks are just going to keep opening up. A few years ago, once I got done cussing, I would have just tossed this kind of blank into the burn pile. Now, however, I’m not smart enough to cut my losses and have decided this is a potential “design opportunity”. I put it back in the kiln and raised the temperature up to 120-125 and lessened the circulation of air. With any luck, I can force the cracks in the bowl to open up even more. If it works, I should be able to fill the cracks with some kind of colored inlay, which will either look really cool when I’m done, or look really cool glowing in the firepit. We’ll see in a couple of weeks…
The rest of the Mulberry logs are going to remain sealed, in half-log form, until at least this fall before I even attempt to do anything with it.
Wire fence bowl
This one, I thought turned out pretty cool! It started out with a plain ash bowl that just looked – well – plain. I thought I’d add a ring to the top of it using a darker color wood to add some contrast. That’s were it started, but sometimes, things just cascade out of control! As I started making the segments for the ring, I thought “Ooh, I can add a hole in the middle of the segment, so it’s see-through! Once the holes were done, it was “Ooh, I can add a post through the circles!”. The it was “OoH, I can add a wire, through the posts, through the circles! “. I stopped myself when I realized I was actually considering how to make the spikes on the wire so that it would look like miniature barbed wire. The amount of work it took to get all that stuff crammed into one ring was no small task and took a LOT longer than I expected to fabricate all the pieces. It’s the first time I’ve attempted something like this and was certainly provided many “learning opportunities”. If fellow turners look closely, there are ample flaws with the execution, but I at least got the top of the ash part to line up with the bottom part. If I make another one, there is a long list of things that I would do differently! Still thinking about how to add spikes, though…
Rotten Potatoes
This bowl is not new. I made it a couple of years ago out of what I think was mahogany and cumaru. I thought there would be a greater variance in the color, but the two just kind of blended together. It was an early attempt at segmented turning that didn’t turn out as anything more than a practice piece. It was slated for the fire! My daughter Emily and “claimed” it, so I let her have it, hoping she would turn it into some kind of planter that would hide the issues visible on the inside. Time passed and earlier this year, while In the process of moving back into the house, it got left in the trunk of her car with several potatoes in it. That was not a typo, there were actual potatoes sitting in the bottom of the bowl. They rotted and left some kind of nastiness in the bottom, that ruined the finish. I thought it was finally ready for the match, but Emily has really big, brown eyes, so Itook it back down to the shop and had to do some work on it. Still don’t like it, but at least at this point it doesn’t stink.
Cherry bowl
This is another bowl from the cherry tree a co-worker gave me. You can see the worms were busy snacking on this one, which left some interesting holes in the sides. The middle of the tree was also starting to breakdown, which causes the darker spots on the side. Pictures can’t show it, but to hold this bowl, it is about 1/4″ thick and feather light.
