So I was slumming around YouTube and found a guy that was using something called “metal reactive paint” to make brand new copper ceiling tiles look like really old, weathered ceiling tiles. Metal reactive paint is apparently paint that has copper, bronze and lead particles floating in it, so if you spritz it with some kind of solution (most likely water) while it’s wet, it will rust the metal floating in the paint. when everything dries, you’re left with the color of the paint, with the addition of either a blue/green patina on the copper and bronze or a yellowish orange on the iron. I figured I’d give it a try and started looking for some of this stuff.
Amazon has it for the low, low price of $12 for a 6 ounce bottle, and that doesn’t include the spritzing solution. WHAT?!? $2 for each ounce? Would you buy a can of beer for $24? I figured there had to be some kind of craft supply house that would be cheaper. I looked at the place I normally buy woodturning supplies from and they have it, too! Their price for a 6 oz. bottle was $15.55. ouch! I figured I’d see if I could buy it directly from the manufacturer and save some money by cutting out the middle man. Nope! They point you to an authorized dealer, the nearest one being an hour away, the next closest two hours away.
After several hours searching, I found a place that sells what I am sure is a counterfeit version, under a different name. They even had videos showing how to use the stuff and some tips. For $38 I was able to score a 6 oz. bottle of copper, a 6 oz. bottle of iron, a 6oz. bottle of light bronze, a 6 oz. bottle of dark bronze, AND, a 10 oz. bottle of spritzing solution. Still kinda pricey, but not sell off a kidney kinda pricey.
Here’s the final result. The whole thing (minus the upholstery tacks added in an attempt to make it look like there were rivets on the top) is made of wood. This one will not go to the burn pile…
Not sure I’m crazy about how tall the finial is on the top, but the overall piece looks pretty good.
Here you can see the inside of the bowl showing the un-oxidized copper color.
Close up picture of what the oxidation looks like.
I was talking with a co-worker and he told me about a storm that came through Central Illinois this spring and slammed his parents. They had damage to their house, a shed, and it tore up an ash tree. As is usually the case, as he was telling me about all the work he was doing to clean up the property for his parents, I kept hearing “free wood”. The standing deal is, you bring me wood, I’ll make you something, so it didn’t take long to broker the exchange. (I actually kinda like these deals, because it gives people the ability to say “remember that tree that used to be in the front yard? Well this bowl came from it!”) The two logs he brought, should yield 4 smaller bowls, about 7″-8″ in diameter.
I roughed them out back in May and left them to dry. I figured there was plenty of time, so I just let them set, continuing to dry. When I checked on them in October, one bowl developed a deep crack that may be problematic, but seems stable enough to continue. The others look fine, minus the usual warping that comes as wood naturally dries, and will have to be “turned out” on the final product. I figured I had all kinds of time to complete the project, since there was no real deadline. WRONG! Things changed at work and my co-worker will be taking a buy-out offer and leaving the company. I decided to get these turned and done before he left, perhaps even before Christmas.
One piece of wood I’m going to hold back (call it a tax) but the first three are all finished. The first bowl started out as a typical, small, ash bowl about 7 inches across and 5 inches or so deep. Ash can look kinda plain if left it’s natural color, so I decided to try to dye the wood with an airbrush. This was only my second attempt at using an airbrush to spray and blend aniline wood dyes and I’m very pleased with the way this turned out:
Top view, showing the colors going from dark blue to green, to gold.Since this is dye, not paint, the natural gain patter still shows through.
The second was really non-descript in terms of grain pattern and color. As plain as ash gets! I decided to add a ring around the top to give it some kind of contrast and decided on adding a ring of santos mahogany from South America. Using just a renaissance wax for a finish allowed the piece to stay fairly close to the initial colors, yet still brining out the redness of the mahogany. Like this one, too!
Top view, showing how the grain pattern looks inside the bowl.Side view, showing the contrasting santos mahogany.
The third bowl had a significant crack that developed right across the bottom as I was turning it. I tried to “turn it out”, but realized quickly that the bowl would end up paper thin if I kept going down that path. Since I don’t know if the crack will continue to grow, heal up, or stay exactly like it is, I skipped adding any embellishments and stayed with the “brown and round” approach.
Adding the wood burned lines was a good touch!the crack can be seen here, on the right side, moving form NW to SE.
Hopefully, Mr. Jacobi will enjoy the pieces and share at least one of them with his parents…
Since I started getting heavy into turning, I had always admired the way some turners were able to stain their projects to get deep, rich color, without covering up the natural grain pattern of the wood. I did some research and found the best thing to use is aniline wood dye, so I bought some. Even though the videos made it look really easy, by early efforts all ended with hard lines between the colors. Instead of getting a bowl that was green on the bottom, fading into purple, then fading into blue on the top, I’d always end up with something that looked like a bad Easter egg colored by a 5 year old. Hard lines, splotchy coverage, and nothing at all like what I had envisioned in my head.
Last Christmas, I got an airbrush for my daughter to use on her costuming projects. After seeing a video on YouTube from a guy in England who was using an airbrush to apply the dye, I figured I’d give it another shot. While I still have a LONG way to go to get the effect that I want, this is a pretty good freshman effort! I love the way you can still see the woodgrain and natural spalting of the wood through the stain.
When Hobby Lobby opens, I’ll be heading in for more airbrush supplies…
I left the foot the natural color, just to show how much different the wood looks with the dye added.I tried to get the color the same density on the top as it is on the bottom, but I’m not sure it was successful.
YouTube has a “black hole” effect, where you go there to watch one video, then three hours later you realize you’ve just watched your 27th consecutive cat video. Don’t feel bad, we’ve all done it. For me, there’s the same effect when looking at craft supply sites. I was shopping for a specific kind of art paint, and more links came up than I was expecting, so I did what seemed right at the time. I looked at about 30 of them, just to see what they offered. About halfway in, I found this paint that I’ve never seen before. It’s not applied with a brush, instead, its put on with a dropper until there’s a puddle. As it dries, something happens and the “stuff” in the paint starts to change shapes and you end up with something that looks like the stuff in the bottom of the culture dishes back in biology class. Cool! Better yet, it comes in different colors and the “stuff” coagulates into different effects. 15 sites later, I found a place that was running a sale and 1/2 off shipping, so I bought a bottle in each color they had: pink, light blue, darker blue, and purple.
To use the stuff, there had to be a surface where the paint could puddle. I made this bowl, but left a wide, flat rim, with a channel around it to hold the paint. Since the wood was pretty ugly and had a couple of huge cracks in the side, I spray painted the outside, then dipped it in pink, white, silver, and black paint, thinking that would go well with the “bio-culture paint” that I was putting on the rim. If I was wrong, I could always put it back on the lathe and take the paint away.
I got the paint I had bought, poured it along the top, mixing the colors a little bit and set it to dry over night. The next morning, my eyes reinforced what my brain had already know for some time: People lie! Maybe the paint did what it was supposed to, but if it did, I think you’d need a magnifying glass to see it. All I saw was a bowl that could have been pretty, but instead was just a mess of color. The only thing I could think to do was put it back on the lathe, turn away all the paint, and leave it with the natural wood sticking out.
Here’s the final product. My initial thought was to make a lid for it, something with a tall, black finial, but now, I only see one option. I figure if I stuff it full of newspaper, then soak the newspaper in charcoal lighter fluid, it should burn hot enough and long enough to get a nice fire going…
The part that’s natural wood was supposed to have all the really cool paint effects. Guess not…
The white, pink and silver was supposed to look less muddy. Turns out white spray paint is thinner than colored spray paint, so it didn’t cover as well.
My town has a wood dump. It’s tucked away between two public parks, off a back road that I’m pretty sure most people in town don’t know about. It’s where the city workers who trim trees and pick up brush go to process what they’ve collected. The small limbs are thrown through massive chippers, leaving mountains of mulch that other workers spread around the town’s public playgrounds. The tree trunks and large limbs get thrown into a massive pile until they either rot away or the city workers get bored enough to cut them up. Picture playing “Pick up Sticks” with telephone poles and you should get an idea of what the place looks like. It’s not the safest place to hang out, but to people who work with wood, it’s a treasure trove! On any given Saturday, if the weather is nice, someone will be there, collecting. Sometimes it’s people fetching firewood for a cookout, sometimes it’s people wanting materials for a DIY project, and once I saw a guy with an “Alaskan sawmill” hooked up to his chain saw, cutting a 100+ year old maple tree into slabs. The city doesn’t care, because the more the lumber bunnies cart off, the less they have to process. For a woodturner, you never know what you’ll find. Ash is always a glut because of the beetles that are killing all the trees and there’s always oak. Every once in awhile, though, something different will be laying there, waiting to be saved from the chipper, which serves as bait. I’ve seen sycamore, maples, and one lonely walnut log that I’m pretty sure the workers had set aside to come back and get after work. (Don’t tell them, but it was me who took a chunk off the end…)
On one of my forages (at least two years ago), I saw a huge oak tree that would have taken a bulldozer to move and had several other logs laying across it. Since I’m not real fond of turning oak, I kept scanning. On top of the oak, was a tree that looked like maple AND it looked like it was freshly cut, so the wood should have had less checking. As I stepped up on the oak tree to look at the maple, I saw the back side of the oak tree had several large burls that had grown out of the side of it. JACKPOT! Burls have THE most interesting grain of any wood, they’re hard to find, and they’re usually scooped up by the first collector on the scene. These, though, had what I’m sure was the remains of a squirrel nest right in the middle of them. That means water surely would have gotten into the middle of the tree and most likely rotted the burls from the inside. I took the chain saw and tried to remove as much of the wood as I could, without causing all the logs to shift an squash me. I ended up getting several chunks, but could tell from the dirt and rot that most of it would be unusable. When I got home, I took the pressure washer to them to get rid of the rotten spots. After the icky parts were removed, there was enough left for some bottle stoppers, a mini-birdhouse or two, and a couple chunks that could be turned into bowls. I cut them into turning blanks and left them to dry.
Cleaning out the garage, I stumbled on one of them and decided to spin it up to see what I had. When working with burls, one of three things will happen:
you’ll get solid wood all the way through, with really interesting grain pattern. This is the equivalent of winning the lottery or getting a brain tumor. Yeah, it happens, but no one really expects it to happen to them.
You’ll get a blank with holes, gaps, voids, rotten spots, etc. that have to be “fixed”. This is the most common. Some people leave them open (creating a hole in the side of the turning) and some fill them with epoxy. I opted for the epoxy route.
You’ll get a piece of wood that is so unstable it will come apart at some point during the turning process. This kind of “blowout” is potentially lethal, usually painful, and not something a rookie turner should try, even with all the proper safety equipment.
Here’s what I came up with and all I can say is WOW!!! This is easily the prettiest thing I’ve turned in quite some time. After sanding this thing up to 20,000 grit, it’s got a coat of Yorkshire Grit (which is an abrasive paste wax) followed by a harder wax product called Renaissance Wax (which is a petroleum based wax). I like everything about this, from the unpredictable grain, to the epoxy fillers, to the feel of the finish. Now, I need to go dig back through the garage and the shop, cause I’m pretty sure there’s another piece like this, somewhere…
The epoxy is actually a dark blue, but in the picture is looks black. LOVE the chaotic grain patterns.Another view, showing the grain.This is what the outside looks like.
Making wig stands for the cancer center can get pretty boring, pretty quick. There’s not a whole lot of variation in the actual turning, so if you’re going to do anything other than “brown and round”, you have to have all that figured out before you start. That takes imagination, and imagination is a fickle bitch!
After making the padded wig stand, I decided I wanted to do something that added some kind of color and fiber to the project. My initial attempt was a thin, light pink ribbon, that I thought would be subtle. As I started to add the ribbon, though, I realized it was actually elastic and cause a whole host of problems. It stretched when it wanted to, so the wrappings were very uneven. It also didn’t like the spray on adhesive I was using to keep it in place, so every so often there’d be this gummy, booger like lump that would show up between the wrappings. I tore it all off, sanded off the blue, and went back to Hobby Lobby to look for options. I found pink para-cord that looked like it would be sturdy enough to work with and would hopefully complete the look I was going for. It wasn’t until AFTER I had the project done that I realized the florescent pink color took all the “subtlety” out of the project. If there’s a cancer patient out there who’s absolutely bonkers for the color pink, this one would be their first pick…
That’s a little more pink than I had expected. And to think, I almost painted the whole thing black before putting the cord on. Now THAT would have made a statement!
I was going through the stash of wood that I have, looking at what was roughed out and ready to turn, what was still waiting to be roughed, and how much checking the half logs had that were stacked in the garage. At the bottom of the pile, I found a walnut bowl that I had started to rough turn, but found a flaw in the wood. A tree branch had apparently started to grow, but must have been cut or broken off and the tree grew around it. From the outside of the bowl, it looked like it would be barely noticeable. From the inside, however, there was this half rotten spot that would need to be “fixed”. Apparently, I had decided it wasn’t worth the effort and threw it in a box to dry.
Earlier me would have thrown it in the burn pile. Lacking both imagination and skill, a flawed piece of wood would be a “give up and find something else to do” kind of moment. Current me said, “there is no better wood to turn that a piece of walnut”, followed quickly by “I can fix this”. There were two options. I could mix up some kind of colored epoxy and turn the divot in the wood into a feature, or take a more traditional approach to fill the hole. Since the spot wasn’t that big, adding one tiny blot of color didn’t seem to make much sense, so I opted for the traditional approach of mixing walnut dust with CA glue and sanding until the surface was smooth and the repair couldn’t be felt. This is the result.
The fixed part doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb and I LOVE the grain patterns in walnut. Nothing so pretty as a simply, walnut bowl with smooth lines and a shiny finish.
While I was looking for office supplies to use/abuse for the bowl for my secretary, I happened to see an end cap display for some holiday decorations. There, just above the plastic cornucopia, was a bag of tightly crinkled paper in fall colors. I stared at it for awhile, trying to figure out what the intended purpose was for a whole bag of wadded up, yet colorful, paper strips. There has to be a market for this stuff, since someone obviously took the time to make a special “cut and crinkle machine” to mass produce it. But, why? Is there some kind of fall celebration, like a mid year Easter, that would require stuff like this to make filler for a basket? Do pet hamsters get some kind of seasonal depression that can be cured by adding crinkled paper in festive fall colors to their bedding? Maybe (since the default interior design move seems to be to stuff a hurricane glass with something made in holiday colors, then stuff a candle in the middle) this was made for a specific niche audience.
I just wondered what it would look like, soaked in resin.
The “look”, totally changes! The bright, festive, holiday colors get dark and not so festive. It doesn’t exactly look like it would fit in with a Martha Stewart inspired celebration around a perfectly carved turkey, candied yams, cranberry chutney, a complimentary wine, and happy conversation with extended family. It looks more like a gloomy, somewhat depressed version of thanksgiving, where everyone’s eating canned turkey, boxed potatoes, stolen apples from the neighbor’s tree, a whole case is Falstaff, and trying hard no to slip up and mention what happened to Uncle Joe’s parole officer.
Maybe I’ll just put a candle inside of it and stuff it inside a hurricane glass…
Side view. This was taken with as much light as I could find to help bring out the colors. Still looks like a muddy, chocolate mess.Top view. You can kinda see how the color was supposed to look, and the clearness of the resin should have allowed light to come through. Still just looks like a gloomy mess…
After the last failure with using resin, I decided to go back to basics a bit and do something simpler. Something that wouldn’t take as long, would be as complicated, and would help build experience mixing and pouring resin. The result were these two small bowls.
My secretary has been dropping not-so-subtle hints for the last three years or so that I haven’t made her anything. When I brought in the pencil holder, made of colored pencils, she really seemed to like it, so I figure I’d make something similar for her desk, but didn’t know what. My first thought was to find some non-metal paperclips and make her a little bowl to hold paper clips. What I found is that no one makes standard shaped paperclips out of anything BUT metal, so that idea was out. I saw a bag of colored rubber bands and thought that might work. What a mistake! Remember the old commercials about the Gillette double edged razors? The one with the graphic about how the first blade stretches the whisker out so the second one can cut it off, shorter? Well rubber bands encased in resin act much the same way. Or, they squish around the tool and don’t cut at all. Most annoying, were the ones that only cut a little bit, and then flapped around slapping everything as the lathe was spinning. The final product turned out ok, although I can’t say this is the best thing I’ve ever made.
Top view. If you look really close, you can see some stubbly places where the rubber bands stretched, instead of being cut clean.Bottom view. This is the look I was going for! Too bad it can’t just sit upside down, like a paperweight…
Last fall, a neighbor cut down a tree. It was a dead ornamental pear tree that I’d guess was about 15 years old or so. Some kind of bug swarmed onto it in the spring and literally ate anything green. Without any way to harvest sunlight, it was dead very quickly. It might have come back in the spring, but they decided it was an eyesore and took it down. My kids saw it, and put out the “hey dad, there’s free wood on the curb” alert. Most of the trunk of the tree wasn’t really big enough to use, but they had pulled the majority of the stump out of the ground and left it there.
Looking at the stump, I thought it would turn into something cool, but didn’t know what. I left it in the garage to dry while I thought about what I could make out of it. Time passed and it got shuffled into a corner, covered by other chunks of “curb wood” and forgotten. This summer, as I was cleaning things up, I found it again. It hadn’t cracked, but it was upside down from how I had initially left it. That’s when it hit me that I could turn a bowl out of the part where the roots were coming out, fill the gaps with colored resin, and make something different, translucent, and big enough to test out the limits of my new lathe. So in August, I started roughing it out.
After it was fairly round, I could see the parts that would need to filled with resin. Here’s the part where once again I was reminded that I really should have paid better attention in school. I vaguely remember Mr. Oyer droning on about this mystical thing called “gravity”. Something about how everything falls down, water seeks it’s own level, and an apple will smack you in the head if you fall asleep outside. Turns out, he was right. Pouring a liquid resin on a circular surface gets real messy, reall quick. I started making little check dams, using duct tape and painter’s tape to build a floor for the resin to sit on and walls for the resin to stay between. Great idea, right? Not exactly… Turns out resin will leak through any small crack in the wall and puddle wherever it lands. Also, because of the circular form, the only place you can pour resin is on the top surface of the bowl, or the inside bottom of the bowl.
The next month was spent building a little dam, pouring some resin, then waiting for it to cure. Repeat, repeat, repeat… When I thought I had it “done”, I put it back on the lathe and started to refine the shape. Three things became immediately obvious. First, the amount of cleanup that would be required for all the times the resin escaped my makeshift dam would be significant. It takes hours to scrape cured epoxy off the floor, the workbench, tools that were setting on the workbench, the lathe, and a towel that ended up just being thrown away. Second, My check dam method worked (kinda) but all too often pieces of the dam got trapped in the epoxy, so as I started to turn, there were little bits of blue and black tape stuck in the resin like that mosquito in Jurassic Park. The bowl got thinner and thinner as I worked to get those pieces turned away. Lastly, when you use tape to build a dam, it makes straight lines. When the bowl was put on the lathe, it left flat spots on the sides of the bowl, so I had to repeat the dam building/epoxy pouring steps all over again until the resin was built up past the arc.
As I was finishing the bowl, I noticed something very odd. The epoxy was supposed to be like a hard, clear, plastic, but what I ended up with was a softer, almost gummy resin that would expand under the centrifugal force of the lathe. Think of finding a gummy bear the kids dropped down the back of the couch a couple of Easters ago and you’ll get the picture. The flexibility of the resin made it impossible to sand, since any grit of sand paper would dig into the resin as it flopped around. It also made it impossible to turn into a circle, since the resin would bow out as it spun. As soon as I realized what was happening, I declared this failure as good as it was likely to get and admitted defeat. $60 worth of resin and a month or so later and I ended with a bowl that looks fantastic from a distance (especially when there is light that comes through it) but is a floppy mess. This is why it is called the red resin failure.
The circle parts on the side was where a large quantity of resin would be needed to build up the side of the bowl. To save money on resin, I added some tree branches, thinking it might look kinda cool. Like the effect, but the branches were very dry and starting to spalt, so the wood started tear out, instead of cutting cleanly.another view. I really like the way the resin filled in the filled in the smaller parts where the roots were branching.From the side view, you can see the light coming through the resin. That’s the exact effect I was going for! If you look on the left side of the bowl, you can see a bump in the rim, which is where the gummy epoxy wouldn’t turn true on the lathe.
