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:

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.