Learning the Turning #19

Camphor Laurel

A truly beautiful wood.  This one reminded me of the giant Red Spot on Jupiter.  Very spacy.  The fragrance was otherworldly too, as I'd mentioned some time ago on another bowl.  Camphor Laurel can provoke allergic reactions in some people, but it doesn't seem to have any affect on me.  If you end up with this one, be wary of that, although the entire surface, inside and out (except for the circular mortise on the base) is sealed by the friction-melted wax finish.  The melt was occasioned by burnishing the surface with wood shavings from the turning process, while still spinning on the lathe.

It's kind of nice once in a while to turn a bowl with absolutely no complications or catches or ineradicable chisel scars in the grain, and to have it turn out to be a truly beautiful piece of wood. The grain is iridescent in places, that is the apparent depth of the grain changes depending on the angle -- sort of like one of those antique plastic toys that showed two different pictures depending on how you tilted it.  Remember those?

Anyway this one turned out rather nice, and I'm really quite pleased with it.

Learning the Turning #18

A taller Huon Pine bowl

When I saw this blank, I thought -- such a beautiful piece of wood, I'm going to stop trying for "beautiful" -- the wood itself handles that nicely -- and try for "exquisite".  

Arrogant much?  Perhaps.  But a guy has to have goals, doesn't he?

Deeper bowls are a little more difficult to turn, as I like the short tungsten-carbide scrapers, so confidence-inspiring that they are, but they don't have a lot of reach.  This means they're not quite as stable once you start extending your reach inside the bowl.  Fortunately, Huon Pine is very forgiving due to its very close grain structure.

Ultimately I went to the high-speed steel bowl scraper, which looks a bit like a comma on a stick. Sharpened.  I'm getting a lot more confident about sharpening chisels.

And why do they call it High Speed Steel?  Simply that it melts at a higher temperature, which means you can sharpen it without turning blue.  The chisel, that is -- I don't hold my breath during the process.

Learning the Turning #17

Huon Pine

Iridescent grain is my reward for spending twice as much time as usual on this one.  

I went into the project with the earnest desire of making this bowl worth the centuries it took to grow the tree.  Arrogant, much?  Maybe, but it's pretty easy to be humble in the face of something that took so long to grow.

I must say I'm rather pleased with this one.  Sunrise on one end, sunset on the other.  

Although Huon Pine has a very dense grain structure, it's not entirely homogenous -- there's complexity and figuring and drift in this, almost as if it were some geological feature, rather than botanical.  Certainly I was aware of its age, as much as an ephemeral meat popsicle can be aware of such, and if you look closely at this piece you can almost feel the warmth and chill of each growth ring.  I apply effort, and am rewarded with imagination and the shy exposure of a tree's inner beauty.

My photo, as usual, doesn't do it justice.  

By the way, I am now numbering these bowls, so they can be matched up with their documentation in this blog.  Which will last longer, the bowl or the bytes?

Swish, and Flick

Rock Maple, waxed.

This wand is not magical. Honest. And even if it were, you would need to be able to use it correctly.  I recommend not buying it for its magical power. A Muggle would get no use out of it, to be sure.

Ravenclaw-aligned might, but it depends on the magical capabilities of the wizard using it. Which is of course silly, because this is not a magic wand. It really isn't.

Learning the Turning

Swish, and Flick

These are not magic wands.  There is absolutely no magic in here.  

These aren't the wands you're looking for. 

Move along.

The skinny one in the background is made of Blackwood with a tung oil finish.

The shorter one in the foreground is also Blackwood, with an orange oil finish*.

They ain't perfect, but they were definitely fun to make.  I'm figuring $65 each plus postage and handling.  PM me if interested, we can work something out.

I can guarantee there will be no two alike.

*Originally posted as rock maple, in error.  Blackwood it is.

Learning the Turning #16

Skipping the Busted Bits

A bit of Huon Pine

In 1616 AD, Officials in Württemberg charge astronomer Johannes Kepler with practicing "forbidden arts" (witchcraft). His mother had also been so charged and spent 14 months in prison. (Wikipedia).

About the same time, the tree that this bowl came from was a healthy seedling.  Huon Pine is like that. Grows only in Tasmania, and it's one of the hardest "softwoods" I've ever encountered.  Turns beautifully.  Takes the term "slow growth" to extremes, though, and I treat it with respect.

The lighting was the same in both shots, each with the bowl turned 90 degrees from the other, and indeed it does look like two entirely different bowls.  The colours approximate what I see, too.  The view from where a bit of "live edge" is showing (bark showing, considered a bit trendy among turners.  I don't know, just think it's pretty) is quite a bit lighter.

This one has a wax finish, and for the first time I've used John Sawyer's hint of using handfuls of wood shavings to burnish and melt the wax in.  I like the idea, and there's no shortage of wood shavings on the floor.

The large, expensive and troublesome Blackwood blank that sang the end of the banjo posted previously, failed due to a very brittle edge, and the fact that the blank was so out of balance I could never get it round enough to make a straight starting cylinder.  Different densities within the wood.  I also found it a bit disconcerting trying to turn with the lathe trying to walk around the workshop as I worked.

So this is bowl #16.  Blank #15 is having its number retired, in gratitude to the rather expensive lessons I learned from it.  No photos of #15, it's in the bin.

Learning the Turning

"A Bit of A Catch"

Catches aren't quite so scary once you discover you tend to do more damage to the blank than you do to yourself.  This happened when I was turning the largest bowl to date, a fairly massive chunk of blackwood with (as I discovered) a nice hidden knot.  Knowing what a knot is (it's just a a piece of branch) I wonder how it managed to embed itself.  I'll leave that speculation for another day, I suppose.

Anyway, this big Blackwood blank was spinning fairly fast for its size -- around 1000rpm -- and was actually moving the lathe around on the floor, and that was after I'd gotten it roughly cylindrical.  I'd gone to a square high-speed steel scraper, and the knot decided it really liked the scraper and wanted to eat it, which it did.

The blank came to a noisy dead stop, stalled the lathe, and I slapped the off switch.  The tool rest looked a little wonky, and I blew the dust off and found I wasn't going to be doing any more turning today.  Off to speak to the spares guy at Carbatec, then.