Well, its been a long day in the shop. I was going to clean up and call it a day when I suddenly remembered my wedding anniversary is this month on the 22nd. I had planned to make my husband a present earlier in the summer and I completely forgot about it.
I have some large branches from a friend in St. Paul who cut down a large tree in his back yard in June and Ive been wanting to turn something from them to test the turning characteristics of the wood. I decided to make my husband a drinking masur for our 32 wedding anniversary. Maple is great turning wood and since its light in color, I could burn a message into the wood with a wood burning pen.
So I got my second wind and went back down to the wood shop and began working. Here we go:
Here is a section from one of the wider branches. Ive drawn a line that Im going to use to split the branch in half:
I love doing this:
And here is the branch after its been split-I wore a lot of eye protection for this and so should you:
I must have gotten cut with a metal sliver and I was bleeding all over everything for a minute. My camera is covered with blood at the moment:
Here is the branch with a circle drawn on the surface. That brown strip is the heart wood and Im going to remove that shortly:
Drilling a mortise on the blank to attach it to the Nova chuck:
And Im turning it between centers. Ill begin at about 300 rpm as this is unbalanced:
This is the blank after about 5 minutes of turning. You can see its beginning to round off:
In this photo Ive removed a lot of the bark. Im going to remove that button on the bottom and flatten the bottom:
In this photograph Ive created a foot and a tenon so I can re-attach it to the chuck in a minute:
Ive flipped it over and begun turning the inside of the bowl. This wood is turning like a champ. Absolutely no problems:
Here is the face of the bowl. Im getting ready to hollow it out:
I put down the camera at this point and hollowed the whole thing out. It took about 45 minutes to hollow it and smooth the inside. When I was done with that I added a rim to the bowl. Ill add a message here in a day or two:
This is it just before I took it off the lathe:
These last two photos are the finish photos:
Im going to let this dry and I may even get brave and microwave it to move that process along a bit. Then Ill add a message to the rim and thin varnish it with salad bowl varnish. So Im not done with it yet.
Stay tuned,
VW
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