“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!
2/22/2016 – The month of February hasn’t allowed much “shop time”, so far. Too much of my day job and family “stuff” going on. I did manage to spend some time in the shop this last weekend to commune with my power tools and decided to finish some bowls I had roughed out about 6 months ago. The result was two projects completed, and two more underway.
The first bowl started was from a nice piece of ash (watch the comments!). It was OK, but after getting the outside shape done, I realized that is looked really, really, plain: “brown and round”, with absolutely nothing about the bowl that was interesting. I took it over to the band saw, set up a tall fence, flipped the face up the bowl up again the fence and cut the top couple of inches off the bowl. Next, I took some Cumaru (a South American hardwood that if not sanded well produces splinters faster than a two year old will eat dirt) and segmented a ring. Gluing the whole thing back together proved to be a bit of a challenge, because the wood grain of the ash needed to line up as closely as possible.
Here’s the end result:
Not too bad for a spur of the moment decision to add the ring.
The second bowl looks on the surface to be a fairly well made natural edged bowl, also made from ash. Pretty plain, but I like the shape and the way all of the bark stayed on the rim without being damaged in the process. As I was making the very last pass with the very last grit of sandpaper on the bottom of the bowl, literally 5 seconds away from declaring victory, I realized I hadn’t tightened the tailstock very well. This epiphany came when the piece came loose from the lathe and began rattling around, banging into the tool rest, the tailstock, dust collector hood, and some tools. What you can’t see in this picture are the 6 or 8 gashes in the bottom that can’t be repaired. At this point, it’s designer firewood.
I had promised someone that I would make them a bowl, after some stuff we were working on was completely done. Well, everything got concluded and I realized that I hadn’t even started on the project. Scrounging through the shop, I found a chunk of willow that had been sitting in the shop since early summer of 2013. Since that’s the same time all the craziness started, I figured I could finish turning it real quick and keep my promise.
The wood for the bowl came from a neighbor, who said it was some kind of willow tree, but not the weeping kind. The he went on to tell me just how terrible this tree had been, how it was basically an overgrown weed, and that the happiest day of his life since moving into the house was having it cut down. All I heard was “free, if you want it”. I remember two things from when I was roughing out the bowl. First, it was some of the wettest wood I’ve ever seen. The moisture meter said 55% and as the freshly cut wood spun, it flung water up the wall, across the ceiling, and across the face shield I was wearing. I had to stop turning every couple of minutes and wipe the shield off so I could see. My smock got wet, my tools got wet, and my patience ran out pretty quickly. Second, the wood had this weird green tint to it. Not enough to look like it had been dyed, but just enough to make it look, well, ugly. My hopes were not high that this free wood was going to be worth the effort it had taken to haul it home.
Time passed and the blank dried. When I put the moisture meter on it and it was at a safe 10%, I figured it was ready to use. There were no noticeable cracks, but it had warped fairly bad. It also had this grimy look on the outside of the bowl, like it had started to rust or had been drug through a whole bunch of dust. My hopes went even lower.
When I started shaping the outside of the bowl, I didn’t really stop to look at the wood, I figured I’d finish shaping the outside of the bowl and then see just how bad things looked. If it was too bad, I could always burn it. When the lathe finally spun down, I was absolutely shocked at what I was looking at. Under the coating of whatever that skeezy stuff was caked to the outside, there was a very pretty blonde color, there was some interesting things happening with the grain pattens, and there was this funky brown streak that was coming out in places. it actually looked pretty cool!
By the time I got the inside of the bowl done and the base of the bowl finished, I was starting to have second thoughts about giving this one away. After it was sanded down to 600 grit, I put on three coats of lacquer, then buffed it and added a coating of carnuba wax. May not be able to see it in the picture, but it feels like glass like and shines in the light.
I ended up giving the bowl away, because after I considered everything this woman had done for my family, this small token of appreciation may still not be enough. Here’s a couple pictures, just to see what I’m talking about:
really turned out well!“Mary’s bowl. Love the way the brown color looks like some kind of amoeba, reaching across the bottom of the bowl.
A lady I work with had a tree that died and wanted to know if I’d like some of the wood. When she said it was a cherry tree, at least 24″ thick, I was all in. Since she gave me the wood, I decided to make her a bowl. Seemed like a fair trade. I had finished the outside and was well into hollowing out the middle when the tool started to make a weird chatter sound. I shut the lathe off as fast as I could. Good thing, because as it was spinning down, the entire bowl split in half!
Good looking bowl one minute, firewood the next!
Turns out, there was a rotten spot right at the base and as the wood was removed, it became less and less stable until it couldn’t take the strain and split.
My initial thought was to throw it in the burn pile, but then My daughter said, “Hey, dad, just Frank it”. Frank is Frank Howarth, a guy on YouTube who makes amazing things! Her and I had watched this video of Frank encountered a similar problem. I figured I had nothing to lose, so I’d try his method for dealing with cracked bowls.
Step #1: cut out the cracked part: This turned out to be harder than you might think. The whole key is that the lines that get cut into the bowl have to be absolutely parallel. If not, it won’t be round when it’s all glued back together. With some creative sanding, I think I got pretty close. Status = Done
something’s missing…
Step #2: make a new piece to take the place of the sliver that was removed: So just as it was important to cut parallel lines, turns out it is equally important to make the new piece of wood exactly the same width as the chunk removed. My first attempt was about a half inch too fat and pushed the bowl so obviously out of round all I could do is chuckle. After a quick trip to the bandsaw and a sander, the final piece fit pretty well. Status = Done.
Step #3: glue it back together and hope it all lines up. OK, so this is nearly impossible to do! linear clamps don’t exactly lend themselves to circular objects, so the clamps kept slipping off. When the bowl broke, it also split off the tenon for the chuck that left little nubs on the bottom of the bowl that kept allowing the insert to slip down. To get it to work, I had to take the bowl halves back to the sander and remove the remains of the old tenon so there would be a flat spot for the bowl to sit on. Then I remembered I have strap clamps!!! The guy who invented this little beauties deserves ever dollar he’s ever made! Running the strap around the bowl cinched it in to the point where most of the glue joints looked pretty good. I added a couple of linear clamps across the top, just for a little more force. Hopefully, this will work. Status = Done.
Step #4: Finish turning the bowl and hope it all stays together! Life kinda got in the way, so my plan of waiting overnight had to be change to waiting a week or so. Since the tenon on the bottom had been sanded off, there really wan’t anything to hold on to from the bottom. Also, the strip that I made was taller than the rim of the bowl, so mounting it from the top wasn’t an option, either. After yet another trip to the bandsaw and sander, I ended up with a top that was flat enough to work with. Mounted the bowl from the top with jumbo jaws, put an shallow round circle in the bottom to expand a chuck into, and turned it back around so it would mount to the lathe. Surprisingly, the final turning wasn’t that hard. As long as I didn’t try to take off all the wood at once, I was good. The final step in turning was to turn it back around on the lathe and make the circle I used to for the chuck, into a shallow, gradual indentation in the bottom. Looks MUCH better, at least to me. What I ended up with looks pretty good, at least from across the room. There are some worm holes on one side, which didn’t come through in this picture, and there were two additional cracks that came out as I finished the turning, running parallel to the stripe, but they don’t seem to go all the way through the bowl. I left the worm holes, filled the cracks with CA glue, then after sanding, added a healthy dose of lacquer based sanding sealer to the whole thing to add a little extra support. I left a place on the top where I can create a lid for this one, which should help to hide the cracks and the “punky” wood that didn’t sand so well on the inside of the bowl. The lid may have to be a different project… Status = Done!
