Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hi everyone, Markerbuoy with you again in the workshop out in the woods,
off grid. Time once again, for a little bit more fun wood turning. And what
I'd like to show you today is how one can correct a mistake. It's a mistake
that I made a number of years ago. I was just finishing off the turning of
the inside of a bowl. And I burst through the screw holes from the inside
that were used to attach the face plate to the foot of the bowl.
I'm going to show you how I use a piece of copper to cover my tracks, as it
were. I'm going to start with a two inch piece, two inch slab of Garry Oak,
it's a species of oak that grows natively on Southern Vancouver island.
It's only two inches thick so it'll be a shallow maybe platter type bowl.
We're going to pretend that I've made a mistake and I've bored through into
the screw hole. And then I'm gonna show you with the copper to cover my
tracks.
So far so good, you never know what you're going to run into with these
found pieces of wood. Set up on the leave here, see how it runs. And the
usual wobble and a little bit of vibration. But we'll soon churn that down
to size.
There, that's described the line, an exact line where I'm going to recess
for the face of the plate. Start the sanding process here. Bring it up a
little bit. That's looking pretty good. Time to flip the bowl around. Now,
that's a little bit slacking there, I've gone a little bit over. So one of
the little tricks that I employ to get that centered is to wrap a piece of
electrical tape around the outside diameter of the face plate. Just makes
it nice and snug in there.
Now, put that right side out on the leave and so begins the hollowing
process. Before I start, I would like to know what the overall depth of my
project is going to be. So I'm just going to put a flat piece of of wood
across the foot and measure... It looks like, yep. We've got two inches,
just as I suspected. So if I hollow to a depth of an inch and a half, it
means I'm likely going to miss those screws that I just put in from the
face plate. And as I mentioned earlier, that was my mistake a long time
ago, was that I gauged out too much of the bowl and I blasted through into
the screws on the face plate. And I remember being rather upset at the
time.
Just have a quick depth check to see how I'm doing here. And it looks like
I'm at an inch and a quarter already. And if you remember, I said maximum
inch and a half on this bowl, this platter. So I'm not far off. So we'll
just carry on, developing the form here and see what happens.
Now I'm going to do a little bit of work on the outside of the rim. What I
thought would look okay would be a couple of grooves on the outside just to
add a little bit of interest. Not forgetting that the primary focus, as
you'll see in a little while, is going to be what's happening right in the
center here.
Let's assume that I did actually blast through the bottom of my bowl. We
would see and be intensely annoyed because we'd have screw holes showing
approximately like so. And what do to? So what I came up with, and again,
perhaps it's not particularly original, is I decided I'd clean up the mess
and leave a sharp circular line just to a fairly shallow depth. And then
we're going to insert a piece of hand beaten copper into there to provide
some, well, it's a cover up is what it is. But it adds considerable visual
interest to the center of the bowl as I hope you will agree.
Now, I've got my area of interest defined here. And we're going to set
about preparing the copper ready to insert into that space. It doesn't
really matter about the diameter because we're gonna make the copper fit
that space exactly. Some of you may have worked with copper. One of the
characteristics of copper along with some other metals, silver in
particular. As you work them, they... What's called they work harden. The
way we soften it is simply to anneal it. And right now the best way of
doing that is to heat it to red head in the fire, quench it just to cool it
down. And then we can start the beating process with a ball pin hammer.
And copper conducts electricity... Electricity... It conducts heat
fantastically well. So it's not going to take too long to get the desired
result.
Copper sheet is now at a nice cherry red shade. And we can quench it in the
water. Be careful, you don't want to get steam all over your hands. Almost
instant cooling there. Not quite. And the copper is incredibly soft after
such treatment. Beautiful colors on the back of the copper there. Simply
put, we just beat a nice design into it right now. While the copper is
soft, I'm just going to flatten it out. Look for a half way attractive area
here. There, that's the disc pretty well cut to size. As good as I can get
it with the snips. So now I'm going to take a file and trim the flat edges
exactly to the described line. All right I've got it cut to the size that I
need. Just a tiny fraction over size in the hole that I cut in the bottom
of the bowl.
So in order to shrink the diameter slightly, what I've done is I've put it
over the top of this coffee can. Got it centered, and just dished it ever
so slightly. Copper is really soft, don't need to tap very hard. And that,
I don't know if you can see that on the camera, that just turns it into
more of a saucer shape. And you'll see why in a second. Now I would be
lying if I told you this was the first fit. I've tested it quickly already
for everybody's benefit, including my own. And I know that this is going to
be a really tight fit in the wood there. And then I reverse the process
that I just used to create the saucer shape and I gently, making sure that
all of the edges are contained, I gently just reverse the dish on the
copper.
So as part of the final sanding we take off any rough edge that remains
from the tin snips or the file around the outside of the copper. And we
buff the highlights of the copper to give it more impact. It'll jump out of
the bottom of the bowl. So we've turned what otherwise was a fairly
nondescript bowl in terms of figure, and we've created a focus for the
bottom of the bowl. Now comes the moment that, I don't know about you, but
I've been waiting for. I'm going to apply some wax and see what the final
result looks like. Then you just work the wax in until the wood won't
easily soak up any more. And leave it for a minute or two.
Play with it my bare fingers. Oh this feels so nice. Then we'll give it a
final buffing and the job's done. So there we have it. We've turned what
would otherwise have been a fairly nondescript piece of hardwood in terms
of figure at any rate, into something that has a focus, something a little
bit different. Very arts and craftsy if I may say so myself. And all as a
result of a mistake that I made a few years ago when I plowed through into
the screw holes in the bottom of the bowl. Now we don't have to do that. We
did this on purpose.
If you're not subscribed to my channel, please subscribe. Click on the
button that will appear at the end of the video and join all my other
subscribers. I hope you all enjoyed the show, thanks once again for
watching I really enjoy hearing from you all with your comments and
questions, so keep them coming and we'll see you next time.