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.

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.