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Cosmic pine bowl

April 2017

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.

ICK!!!

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.

 

Top view: From this angle, there’s not a whole lot to look at, other than the discoloration at the bottom from where the heartwood was nearing the sapwood.
Side view, showing the color and finish that I was able to get. Really, REALLY, like this one!!!

Megan’s Wig Stand

May 2017, Uncategorized

The  woodturning club that I belong to has an ongoing charitable effort going on to make wig stands that can be given to cancer patients.  I’ve posted a couple of posts showing ones that I’ve made already, but don’t intend to post every single one.  That would get as boring to look at as it will become making them over and over and over…  This one is different.  I turned a wig stand out of douglas fir, which I had never used before.  When it was done, it looked ok, but there really wasn’t anything about the wood that was worth looking at.  Straight grain, no inclusions, nothing.  One step above looking at a 2×4.  The only thing I could think of to make it look less boring was paint.  Lots and lots of paint!

I remembered my daughter Megan and her history (compulsion?) of doodling on herself.  Since junior high school, if she has a ball point pen, some time, and a sense of boredom, she’ll start coloring.  Usually up her arm, across her hand, or if she had a pair of jeans on that looked like they needed embellishment, across her pants.  We would always yell at her and tell her to stop, but I have to admit that some of the stuff she came up with was pretty cool looking!  Kinda looked like Indian henna designs, but with a different flare.

I asked her if she’d like to do one of her doodles on a wig stand and she agreed.  Below is the final product that she came up with.  WOW!  Megan did a FANTASTIC job!

I’m sure the person who gets it will appreciate the artwork.  What was even cooler to me, was that my daughter and I collaborated on making something that actually turned out very nice!  Hopefully, this is the first of many to come…

Imagine coming home from work and finding your daughter spent all of study hall making her arm look eerily similar to this! Looks fantastic on a wig stand, not so much on an arm…
She even did under the top.

Olivia’s segmented bowl #3

April 2017, blog

I accidentally started a tradition.

When my oldest daughter had her baby shower, she needed a bowl to hold envelopes. The theme of her shower was “Chevrons” so I made a bowl with a segmented chevron pattern around the rim.  Since we already knew she was having a boy, I carved his name in the bottom of the bowl and inlaid it with ebonized walnut.  Then, on the bottom next to where I signed it, I wood burned a greeting for him. My intention was to make something nice for the shower that my daughter would appreciate. When my second daughter had her baby,  she asked me in the hospital when Kenlee would be getting her bowl.  That’s how it started!   Now that my third daughter has had a grandchild, I need to get a bowl made for her.

I decided to make a segmented bowl, out of Brazilian Mesquite  with the feature ring of Purple Heart and maple. To try to add some thing different,  I decided to use a different number of segments and every other ring, that way it didn’t look like a brick wall pattern. Apparently, I should’ve paid better attention in geometry class in high school, because as I changed the number of segments with each ring, the ending shape when I stacked them all altogether just looked wrong!   To fix it, I went to 12  segments per ring and set the eight segment rings aside.  I also had some 12 segment rings that were the wrong side, so I sat them aside as well.  By the time I got done gluing up all the outcast rings, I ended up with enough material to make three bowls.  This is the first one I finished.  I really like the way it turned out!

Now the dilemma, do I give Olivia all of the bowls  since two of them will be a matching set, or do I give her this one and save the two outcast bowls for me. If I give her more than one, I’m sure I’ll have to take a second for the other two grandchildren – and any future grandchildren – to realize they need a matching set as well. If I keep it for myself, well… That doesn’t seem very grandfatherly.

From the side, it almost looks like different pieces of wood.
From this angle, the variance in the coloration of the wood is apparent.

Natural edge Mulberry

February 2017, Uncategorized

Last week, as I was getting ready to go to a friend and mentor’s shop to turn, I was looking for a project to take.  I stumbled on a piece of a tree that wasn’t with all the rest of my green wood and looking at it, I’d forgotten where it came from and couldn’t come up with a reason why it would have been away from the rest of the wood hoard.  I decided to take it and see what we could make out of it.  When we cut into it, it became clear that it was mulberry.  About a year ago, aco-worker told me his in-laws had a big mulberry tree come down in a storm and asked if I’d be interested in any of it to turn.  That’s kinda like telling a crack addict that you know a guy who cooked up too much meth and wanted to know if they want a taste. The answer is always going to be a strong yes!  The chunk of wood I took was thinner than the other chunks that came from the tree and was from a place in the tree where several branches had kinda joined together.  Usually, that part of a tree will give one of two things:  Either you’ll find a whole bunch of knots that are prone to cracking and are a pain in the butt to work with, or you’ll find some really cool looking grain patterns because the the tree doesn’t really know which way to grow when it hits those kinds of intersections.  I figured we’d spin it up and see which I got.

We finished the outside at Bob’s shop. This morning, I finished the inside, about an hour and a half of sanding, and then started applying the finish.  Mulberry is really good to turn, but it can get a little stringy and if there’s end grain, it can leave a really “chippy” surface.  The final product will look good, it’s just that you’ll have to factor in some time for extra sanding.  Here’s the final product.

I don’t make many natural edge bowls, because it’s hard to keep the bark on them and without the bark, they usually don’t look as good. This one turned out GREAT!
Another view…

This one is going to the wood pusher who hooked me up with the fix.  That’s the standard deal.  You give me a tree, I’ll give you something made from it.

 

Offset ring bowl

February 2017

I made a bowl out of white oak and it turned out pretty plain.  Not ugly, just plain.  As I was turning it down, it kept getting thinner and thinner, because of how much the blank had warped as it dried, so the end result was about a quarter of an inch thick.  Nice size for a finished project, but that doesn’t leave a whole lot of room to add grooves, inlays, or some kind of texturing to lessen the “plain-ness”.  I thought about coloring the whole thing, but my experience with oak said that’s probably not a real good idea.  I decided to cut the top of the bowl off, make a ring of some other kind of wood to fit in the cut, then put it all back together again.  I’ve done it before, and it’s actually a pretty simple process.

That’s where accidents happen:  right at the point you decide what you’re doing is easy, doesn’t require a whole lot of planning, and will only take a minute to accomplish.

When I put the bowl against the resaw fence on the bandsaw to cut the top off, I didn’t really check the bandsaw to make sure it was “set”.  I had been messing around with some angles for a segmented project I’m thinking of and had moved the table off zero degrees, so the table had a slight tilt.  On top of that, I didn’t check the blade guides, and the blade was pushed off-center to one side.  When I started cutting the bowl, the two issues seemed to magnify each other, and there was a horrible “drift” in the cut that was made.  Instead of making a cut that was parallel to the top of the bowl, I ended with a horrible, wonky cut that isn’t even a straight line because the blade drifted so bad.  The line was so wavy, a segmented piece with any thickness at all won’t make contact with the bowl when it was glued back together, so I decided to use some very thin veneer to make the ring.  That was flexible enough to bend to the wonky cut, but how do you clamp it all back together?  Since it was cut on a angle, the pressure from standard clamps just caused the pieces to slide off each other.  I tried using CA glue to glue scrap wood to the bowl to keep it from sliding, but the scrap wood either broke loose or left a gap, so that wasn’t any help.  I ended up using a couple of strap clamps to  get everything to hold and it actually worked out pretty well! Next time, I need to be able to control the cut, and need to use more strap clamps to make sure the pressure on the veneer is consistent.

The end result didn’t turn out too bad!  I wonder what it would look like if there were multiple offset rings cut into the bowl?  hum…  Suddenly need to go to the shop and look for bowl blanks that are ready to be turned…

White oak with a veneer ring of walnut and maple added. The off-center cut wasn’t planned, but I think I like it.

Woven bowl

January 2017

This weekend, I found a small piece of something that I think was from an ornamental pear tree.  The wood turns nice and finishes to a glass like finish, but it’s pretty boring wood, with no real grain pattern to see.  After the basket/bowl collaboration that I completed earlier, I decided to tinker around with a little weaving myself.    How difficult could it be?  This is the final result.  Not sure I like it, but I did learn a couple of things.  First, wrapping some kind of material around posts sounds like it’s really easy.  Not so much…  Second, the ends of my fingers are still sore from all the poking and pulling the grass strips.  I think I’ll stick with the turning part and leave the weaving to someone who knows what they’re doing!

Doing the weaving myself felt like I was somehow cheating on Michelle (the woman who did the weaving on the last project), anyway.

My first attempt at weaving. My intent was to let the brass rods show through the weaving, but I used an even number of posts, which caused a “design enhancement”. Who knew this would be so complicated, so quickly?

Maple and plexiglass tea light

blog, December 2016

So I was cleaning some things up and found a piece of plexiglass that had been cast aside from the failed attempt at making a vacuum chamber our of a pot used for canning.  Remember that epic fail?  I set it aside, thinking there was something I could do with it later and kept cleaning.  A few minutes later, I found a small piece of maple that I had roughed out when it was really wet, but since I stored it incorrectly, it had warped to the point I thought it would only be good for firewood.  When I went to put it in the burn pile, I saw the plexiglass and had an idea.  I turned the maple into the only shape the wood would allow, then cut it into pieces, then glued it back together, with the plexiglass where the cuts were made.  Two things were learned.  First, I used CA glue (super glue) to hold it together.  If I ever make another one, I think some kind of epoxy would be much better, since the glue joints failed about 5 times while I was turning this.  Took quite awhile to sand the damage marks out of the piece each time it went flying off the lathe.  Luckily, none of the pieces shattered!  Second, plexiglass doesn’t really “cut”, it just kinda heats up, melts, and then gums up your chisels.  Pretty messy project!  Can’t argue with the final results, though.  This turned out WAY better than I expected it to!

Got me thinking, though.  I wonder if I could cut the bottom off of a wine bottle, turn a base to hold the candle, then put the wine bottle over the candle like a chimney?  There’s a crappy brand of Riesling that comes in a pretty blue bottle that might look kinda nice…

Here’s a picture with the lights on and no tea light. When I cut the lines on the bandsaw, the blade drifted, so the plexiglass isn’t exactly parallel with the rim of the bowl. Another learning lesson…
With the lights off, this looks pretty cool as the light comes through the side of the bowl.

Purple bread bowl

blog, December 2016

A few months back, I wrote about a project that I had started in collaboration with a woman I work with from Atlanta, who is a weaver.  I had made two bowls out of white oak, cut them in half, and sent them down to her.  She was going to weave them back together.  The hope was we’d end up with an elongated bowl, like bread is served in.  Well yesterday, she returned them with the weaving done.  WOW!  Michele Payne, they look AWESOME!  There was a little “finish work” to do, so since an ice storm hit last night, I got some shop time today.  This is the first of the two bowls.

It needed some wooden strips across the top to finish off the top of the weaving, but I couldn’t find any white oak that would match the grain of the bowl without it looking “weird”, so I put in strips made from mahogany.  Finished the final sanding, hit it with a couple coats of a food safe polyurethane, and declared this project done.  VERY, VERY happy with the results!  I haven’t seen anyone else doing something like this, so if it’s nothing else, it’s original.

Thank you, Michele, for your work on this one.  Can’t wait to see what else is possible!

Side view of the purple woven bread bowl. With the way the weaving is done and the wooden strips to add stability, there is basically no “sagging” in the middle.
Top view, so you can see the work that Michele did a little better. Really, really like the look of this one!

Wig stand #2

blog, November 2016

So this one is made out of segmented wood, which kinda breaks up the vertical look a bit.  I decided to put a piece of Corian in the top, which felt like a really good idea at the time.  My thought process was that the Corian would help with some of the moisture issues that come with cancer patients who wear wigs.  After getting it done, I realized that even though I chose green Corian and not a softer pinkish color that I also have, it still makes it look very boob-like, which was NOT my intention…

 

Wig Stand #2

 

Wig stand #1

blog, November 2016

The turning club that I’m in was looking for some way to blend the art/craft of woodturning with some form of charitable giving.  Other clubs are supporting a group called “beads of courage” by making boxes that are given to young cancer victims who use them to hold beads they are given with each cancer treatment.  Cool project and it helps kids, but there are many, MANY clubs doing this.  Several clubs are turning pens that are donated to a group that re-sells them and keeps the cash.  Some clubs hold auctions of donated projects and donate the cash.  We were looking for something different.  For me, I really don’t like to just give money to a group claiming they’re going to do good things with it.  That kind of group always seems to grow the administration on the payroll, first.  I was thinking something that would help people directly, without having to have someone else decide how to “spend” the donations.

What we decided on was making wig stands.  May sound weird, but in talking to the Susan G. Koman Breast Cancer Center in Peoria, il., apparently they already have programs that make or give wigs to women who have lost their hair due to cancer treatments, but they have nothing to offer the women to put their wigs on when they take them off.  Makes sense, if you think about it.  For me, it’s a way to help someone directly and all the middle man gets is the time it takes to broker the trade. I like turning. I like women. I like boobies. So, I figured I had four good reasons to get behind this cause and help out.

Most of the stands being made are “brown and round”, like a dome stuck on a stick, stuck in a circle.  Very utilitarian.  I figure as long as the person is going to have to stare at it, I might as well try to do something to make it worth looking at.  I made the top out of colored epoxy clay, so it wouldn’t be damaged by the sweat, heat and moisture that comes from the wigs. The chemo apparently does horrible things to the women, sweating profusely being one of them, so you have to be very careful with the finish that you use. I also added a little indentation in the bottom to hold ear rings, necklaces, rings, or anything else that needs to be held.

Here’s my first donation:

Wig Stand #1
Wig Stand #1 – Top View

The sad thing about this whole project is that even though the club has already donated at least 50 wig stands in the last two months, they’re giving them to women faster than we can make them.  Way, way, way too many cancer patients out there!  Didn’t I hear a few years back about all these new treatments in mice that were eliminating tumors and new vaccines that could prevent some cancers from forming in the fist place?  What happened to all that?  I for one would like to put cancer industry out of business.  Just saying…