Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi, Alan Stratton from As Wood Turns dot com. St. Patrick's Day is almost here. I don't
have an appropriate pot for the leprechauns to leave me their gold in. So, I need to make
one. At a recent club meeting, Nick Stagg did an
excellent demo on bowl turning. I'll use some of his techniques plus what I've learned
from others such as Richard Raffan. He also left me an ash blank. He used this
as a jam chuck. It has an expansion recess on this side. But since he hollowed it down
on this side, I going to reverse it and put my expansion on this side and make a roundish
bowl this way. Let's see how it turns out. I gotta have
a place for that gold. Unfortunately, this piece of ash wood had
been left for a month without any treatment while I was out of town. In this time, it
developed some nasty checks or cracks in the end grain. I hoped that the checks would disappear
if I tooled off about one half inch. I cleaned off the remnants of Nick's jamb chuck and
trued up the blank. I made a new recess in which to insert my
chuck. I sized it to be just a little larger than the minimum for my chuck jaws. I'm
used to measuring the inner size of the jaws. So, I had to be careful to switch my brain
to measure the outer edge of the jaws. Then I proceeded to shape the bowl's outside
and remove the checks. Just a little bit more to get rid of the checks.
Oops, I was wrong, the checks went much deeper. Instead of a nice big pot for the leprechaun's
gold, it was going to be much smaller. After seeing the smaller diameter, I figured
there would not be enough wood to hold the chuck in expansion without splitting out the
base. So, I had to tool off the bottom a bit more and disguised the mounting tenon as a
bead that the chuck could grab onto. One thing I learned from my recent Richard
Raffan class is that mounting tenons do not have to be huge. So, the small bead is just
larger than the minimum diameter of my chuck so the chuck could grab with as much contact
around the bead as possible. Then pray I would not get a nasty catch.
I went ahead and finished the base with some decoration. Then sanded the outside and finished
it with mineral oil and beeswax. With a little luck, I would not have to reverse mount the
bowl again to clean it up. I reversed the mount so I could begin hollowing
the interior. To avoid stain from the interaction of the tannin in the wood and the iron chuck,
I put some very thin plastic between the bowl and the chuck. I started hollowing with my
large bowl gouge. With the smaller size of this bowl, this was going to be tight quarters.
I decided to drill out the middle -- more to establish my maximum depth than for wood
removal. Another lesson from Richard Raffan. He is
not a purest on using bowl gouges. Once the depth gets so far that a bowl gouge becomes
dicey, he has no problem switching to scrapers -- both to remove wood at the bottom and
curved scrapers to refine the interior of the bowl.
I don't have his repertoire of curved scrapers yet. Instead, I switched to a round carbide
cutter on a heavy bar and handle. I used this cutter to both remove wood at the bottom and
in shear scraping mode on the interior sides to refine them.
I took a little more off the exterior then started sanding up thru about 120 grit. Sanding
with mineral oil and beeswax sure helps reduce the dust flying around.
Then I stopped to form a couple of small beads around the opening. I did not want to hit
the bead with any coarse sandpaper. Just the finer grits for cleanup would be sufficient.
My disappointment with this bowl is not putting in a plastic bag while I was gone out of town.
It also has a slight bump on the outside that I should have smoothed out. The walls are
slightly too thick for this size of bowl. However, this wood is still wet and will still
warp. Maybe the bump will be hidden by the warp. And after letting it dry, I still could
remount it and refine it to remove the warp and the bump. We'll see.
Meanwhile, maybe with the smaller bowl, it will not scare the leprechauns away and they'll
leave me at least a little bit of their gold in my Pot of Gold.
Please like this video. Please subscribe and we'll see you with the next one.