Some people learn by reading but others do not.  So I include lot of pictures with the text to help those others.

In the previous blog post I showed how to use a chain saw to prepare bowl blanks for mounting on the lathe.  In this post I show the steps for mounting the blank on the lathe and turning a bowl.  Specifically I am going to show how to make a natural edge bowl.  In natural edge bowls the outside or bark side of the blank will become the rim and the inner side ( heart wood) will become the base.

Natural rim bowls have visual appeal and certain advantages.  Since the outside of the log is curved the natural rim bowl will have an undulating edge going from high to low and back again.  It also will have bark on the outer part of the rim, provided it stays on, and a ring of lighter sap wood with darker heart wood in the center of the bowl.  This gives strong visual contrasts which many feel are attractive. Since the rim is already curving, any warping of the bowl rim as it dries will be undetectable.  Finally, the bowl can be turned and dried in a couple of days while a cut rim bowl may take months to dry and then has to be remounted to the lathe and turned again to hide the warping that inevitably occurs and achieve the final wall thickness.

For some, having the two higher sides of the rim in the same plane and the two lower sides of the rim also in the same plane are desirable.  It gives a feel of balance.  So I am going to assume this is the desire in this piece and will show how to mount this blank of cherry wood to achieve that end.

Here I have brought the blank to the bed of the lathe.  My first job will be to determine the plane of the axis of rotation to give the effect mentioned above.  If I just mounted a faceplate to the flat side in this picture the high sides of the rim would not be in the same plane.  That also goes for the low sides of the rim.  Note that I have not added the faceplate yet but am going to turn this blank between centers.  To do this you need a large spur drive center in the head stock and you need to cut away the bark in the center so that the spur drive center can grip into the wood and not spin in the loose bark.  First I fit the drive center into the hole in the bark on the outside of the blank and then draw the tail center up to the other side to pin it securely.

Here I am pinning the tail stock into the heart wood side of the blank.  This is just a temporary fix and much adjusting will be needed.

It is not just a matter of putting the tail stock into the center of the circle that is the base of the blank.  In this job it would be nice to have four arms but I have learned to make do with two. The blanks may be heavy and awkward.

Now I have the tail center in the approximate location and am ready to clamp the tail stock to the lathe bed.

Here I have clamped the tail stock to the late bed and am ramming the tail stock into the blank to hold it securely.

Now I am ready to turn the blank by hand to make the final adjustments.

From visual inspection I have determined that the flat plane of the heart side of the blank made with the chain saw is not the plane I want.  Here you see that I have changed the angle quite a bit by lowering or raising the position of the tail stock.

Using my finger as a fixed reference point I slowly turn the blank between centers and see if I can  get the higher edges of the rim to lie in the same plane.  I make adjustments by either raising or lowering the position of the tail stock center on the blank at the heart wood side of the blank.  It is a trial and error exercise and it may take several adjustments to make the satisfactory change.  Here is where an extra set of hand would come in handy.

Once you are satisfied you have the high sides of the rim adjusted properly then you need to do the same process for the lower sides of the rim.  Once that is done you need to go back and check and make sure that both high and low sides are properly adjusted and make any slight changes that are needed.  Now you are ready to prepare the foot so that it is completely flat and in the plane that is perpendicular to the bed of the lathe.

As you can see from this photo and the one below that significant amounts of wood needed to be removed to true up the base allow the face plate to sit flat on it.

Here the truing up process is just about complete and the blank is ready for removing from between centers  for faceplate attachment.

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Here I am using a wood carving gouge to remove the button of wood so that the face plate will sit flat on the base.

I like using a wooden mallet on the wood handled gouge.  This is one that I made which has a head made of dogwood.  It is a very hard wood but does not damage the wood handle of the gouge.

Now I am using a power drill to mount a six inch face plate to the heart side of the blank.  I really like the Souix angled drill shown here.  I find it more ergonomic for this use as well as for bowl sanding.  Everyone has their own preference for fasteners.  Frankly,  I just use sheet rock screws as they are cheap and quick.  I have tried thicker screws, stainless steel screws and just keep coming back to the sheetrock screws.  To compensate for the reduced holding power of these screws I just use more of them.  I prefer the square drive screws.  It is a good idea to measure the amount of the screw that will protrude from the faceplate.  This will tell you how much wood must remain waste wood on the bottom side of the bowl.  There are other ways of getting around this problem such as having the base go inside the circle of screw holes but for now we won’t go into that.

Here I am sharpening my 5/8 inch gouge with an Ellsworth jig.  I find the Ellsworth grind the most satisfactory one I have used.  You will find a description of David Ellsworth’s book in other blog issues I have written on this site.

Now the outside of the bowl has been finished.

Here I have started to turn out the inside of the blank.  When using a large blank, the banjo of the tool rest will not slide under the blank.  That means that you have to think ahead.  When doing the outside you need to slide the banjo all the way down to the head stock before screwing the face plate and bowl blank to the lathe.  When you want to do the inside of the bowl you need to remove the faceplate and bowl blank from the head stock and slide the banjo towards the tail stock and then reattach the face plate to the head stock.

Here I am sitting on the lathe bed as I hollow the inside.

Here is more of the same with the chips flying.  Turning wood which is wet allows for more aggressive cuts as the wood is softer (by 40%) when wet.

As I go deeper into the bowl I switch from the straight tool rest to a curved one so my  gouge is supported closer to the cut I am making.  It is safer and easier on the turner as you have greater mechanical advantage from a longer lever arm.  The tool rest is the fulcrum and the closer the fulcrum is to the cutting end of the gouge the greater the mechanical advantage.

Here I am measuring the depth by placing a straight rod, in this case my gouge, to the center bottom of the inside of the bowl.  It is good to sight down from one high rim to the other so that you get a true reading of the depth.

I place my thumb on the exact point of maximum depth and then take the gouge out of thebowl and using my thumb mark transfer the depth mark to the outside of the bowl.  Then I make a mark on the outside of the bowl to indicate how deep the bowl is on the inside.  As I  cut the bowl from the face plate this will keep me from making the parting cut too shallow or too deep.

Here I am making a cut to the final uniform thickness of the bowl wall from the inside.  The outside was already set before we began to turn the inside.  It is very important to have the bowl wall thickness uniform  in order to avoid checking of the wood when it dries.  Some will check no matter what you do but if the bowl wall is thin and uniform, very few will check has been my experience.

Every time I am too lazy to use the calipers, I regret it.  Here the calipers are set at a known width and slid down the bowl wall, with the lathe off.  When it begins to hang you know that more wood needs to be removed at that area.  Trimming cuts like this need to be done gently.  You cannot replace wood you have turned away.

Measuring of the bowl wall thickness is now complete.  Notice that in some areas of the rim the bark has come off.  When this happens I remove all the bark.  If it all stays on I leave it on.  Some people love the bark left on for the added contrast.  Others feel it is too impractical to use around food.  The bark edge is somewhat delicate and can chip off.  However, it is not too delicate or it would not have survived being cut to a narrow width with a gouge while spinning at 500 rpm.

In this picture I am removing some waste wood about the base and getting ready to use a parting tool.

Here I am using a thin parting tool to remove the bowl from some of the waste wood into which the face plate screws are lodged.

This is a trick I learned from a master bowl turner named Fred Williamson.  See the article on Fred williamson’s bowls elsewhere on the blog.    I will not complete this cut for several days.  However, I cut in deeply enough to leave only 1 to 2 inches of wood of the base of the bowl still connected with the waste wood with the screws attached.  How deep the cut depends on the size  of the bowl and the size of the faceplate being used.

What this step accomplishes is to separate the bowl base from most of the still wet wood in the waste attached to the faceplate.  I will leave the bowl just as you see it now.  In one to two days it is dry enough on the surface to begin sanding.  I use my Souix drill with sanding pads to do the rough sanding.  If you have ever tried to hold a large curved bowl in your lap to try to do this sanding you appreciate how nice it is to have the bowl still rigidly attached to the lathe so both hands can be used on the sander.  Working near the base, the lathe can even be spinning slowly to speed up the sanding process.  So the one or two inch plug at the bottom is enough to hold the bowl on the lathe but still most of the wet waste wood has been separated from the bowl so that the bowl base can dry evenly.

I am very grateful to Fred for sharing this technique with me.  If you have several faceplates then you can have multiple bowls drying for several days while you continue to turn more bowls from wet wood.

When you have completed the sanding of the bowl on the lathe then just cut through the plug that holds the base to the faceplate with a hand saw.  This is safer for me than parting off a large bowl with the lathe spinning.  If you use a saw, be careful how you angle the cut so that the saw teeth do not cut into the base of your bowl.  Sanding will finish the base so that it looks professionally done.

Here is the finished bowl.  All the bark has been removed and the rim has been trimmed with a pattern maker’s spokeshave and sanded smooth.

To finish my bowls I sand through grits 80, 120, 180 and 220.  Then I spray with dewaxed shellac  (I use Bullseye brand in an aerosol can available from Klingspor) to seal the grain.  Since the shellac has been dewaxed it is compatible with any other kind of finish including oil finishes. Sealing with shellac keeps the oil stain from soaking in the end grain and oozing out later to spoil the surface.  I sand all the shellac off starting with 220 grit and then progress with 320, 400 and 600 grit.  At this point I apply tung oil.  I get a food-safe grade and dilute it with mineral spirits so it will penetrate.  I use anywhere from one to four coats of tung oil waiting 24 hours between coats.  More coats give a deeper looking finish.  Then I like the bowl to dry for a month or more and then use the Beale buffing system I have described in earlier blog posts.  This starts with a coarse abrasive and ends with carnauba wax all applied with a buffing wheel.  This is a real labor saver and results in a low gloss sheen.  I am not in favor of shiny plastic appearing finishes.

Everything is easy when you know how.  With the ability to show text and graphics, it puts the skill of wooden bowl making within the reach of anyone who has the proper equipment.  Woodworkers have been generous to share their skills with me and I am pleased to be able to pass them on to you.

As one progresses with woodworking skills the home soon gets filled with the products of your handiwork.  The next step is to give gifts to relatives and friends.  If output continues you may turn to selling your work as I do.

People love stories.  It is one of the most important ways we learn. Wood tells a story to those who know how to read the script.  Its pattern will tell you the species of wood and from which part of the tree that piece was taken and how it was sawn.  A good finish will allow you to easily count the annual rings and thus tell  you if the tree was competing for life in a dense forest or was open grown judging by the width of the rings.

So that tells the tree’s story.  How about the story of the maker?  History is nothing more than a composite story.  So the story of the lovely wooden finished piece is incomplete without the story of the maker of the piece.  The maker’s name on the piece allows the historian to know something more.  A date after the name makes it even better because it pinpoints the time in the history of the maker’s life.

Early on I got in the habit of signing my work.  Some of my earlier work was embarrassingly crude.  As I progressed, I improved.  Now you can trace this progress by comparing the dates of the signed pieces.

At first I resorted to carving my name and date into the wood with hand tools.  This proved too laborious as the output increased.  Next I resorted to using permanent magic markers.  They do not do what they promise.  In a few years the ink had faded and could scarcely be read.  You are better off signing things in pencil than ink as the ink fades over time and pencil does not.  The trouble is that pencil is subject to wear on exposed surfaces.

I had a wonderful friend as a medical patient and he ran a machine tool shop.  I asked him to make me a branding iron to put my logo and name on the furniture I was then making.  He did a beautiful job and it is very special to me.

The logo was an escutcheon from an 18th century Georgian table that I no longer have and my friend is no longer with us.  Yet I have the very pleasant memory of both in my branding iron.  I just heat it up on the top of the stove and press it into the wood.  Be sure to line up the outer edges of the iron on the wood with some pencil marks.  I found it was easy to miss mark the brand when it was hot and you could not see the lettering as it was on the bottom. Many woodworking supply houses will make you your own custom branding iron either with or without a heating element.

The term FECIT appears after my name.  In the middle ages artisans would add this to their name.  It is Latin and is the third person singular form of the verb facto, factare meaning to make.  It gives us the root of our English words manufacture, factory, factor, etc.

When I made an oval stool with cabriole legs I realized the limitation of the branding iron.  It only works on flat surfaces.  If there is just the slightest unevenness the brand is not complete.  For a wood turner, for instance,  it is just about useless.  So the next thing I tried was a wood burning kit with a fine tip.  It did work but I found that the fine tip would catch in the grain of the wood and make for poor penmanship.

After doing some more reading I got a ball point for the burner.

This was much better as it would glide over the grain irregularities as it burned the signature.

This was fine when I was writing large but when I wanted to sign very small objects it was not very satisfactory.   I make some wooden clasps for knitted shawls and scarfs that you can see on my web site. Using highly figured wood, the two sides of these clasps are often quite different. One person might like one side better than the other.  I found that when I burned in my name and date on one side it meant that the signed side was no longer an option for outer wear.

How could I sign my clasps and other small objects unobtrusively?  I began to scout around for finer tools. I came across high speed air driven dental tools that looked great but started at $1000 and required an air compressor.  This was out of my budget and beyond my tight space requirements.  The other day I found an engraver in the Craft Supplies catalog.

They are a fine outfit that has everything for the wood turner. It probably had been there in previous catalogs but this time it just jumped out before me.  The nice thing is that it was only $24, and that was more like my budget.  Further it would not only engrave wood, but metal and other substances.  It is small enough to be held like a pencil and the carbide point will write as fine a script as your hand can manage.

There is a motor attached to the point which produces vibrations that allow
the tip to etch.  The intensity of the vibrations can be controlled to allow you to control the depth of the engraving you do.

This turned out to be just the thing for my shawl clasps.  I could put my initials and the date on them in such an unobtrusive way that the clasp could even be worn with the engraved side out.

Now the wearer is not limited by which side is showing.  If one wants the engraving to be bolder then there are wax based pigments and coloring agents that are like crayons.  You rub them over the engraving and then rub off the surface excess. The pigment in the recesses cannot be removed and serves to highlight the engraving.  I learned this trick when I watched the accomplished turner Cindy Drozda demonstrate making one of her famous finial boxes.

So these are some of the things I have learned about signing my work.  It is better to give or sell signed pieces. It adds another level of meaning to the one who receives it.  It also provides an historical record of the path you have taken.  This is not meant to be an exhaustive treatise on the subject but just a trial an error record of my attempts.  Hopefully, this may be of help to you.  It seems there is no one method for signing every kind of work but there is one that will work for each specific medium.  So let your creations tell the whole story.

Well begun may be half done but it ain’t over ’til the fat lady sings. For those of you who are younger, many public performances live, on TV and on radio were ended when Kate Smith, who was a bit stout, sang God Bless America. Youth has always been impatient for grown up activities to come to an end and I can just see a father bending over and saying to his son the line about the fat lady singing.

There is a great urge for the new woodworker to skimp on the final steps so that he or she can use and admire their handiwork. It is a natural reaction but one that I don’t recommend. The difference between a well finished piece and a sloppily finished one is profound. Wood is such a beautiful medium. When its surface has been poorly sanded, you cannot see the beauty of the grain pattern and its subtle colors. This is due to the refraction of light by many fibers sticking proud of the wood surface. It is similar to the halo effect when you have a subject backlit by having it between you and the sun. The features become indistinct because each leaf or hair strand or whatever you are trying to photograph bends the light in many different directions and contrast is lost in a fuzzy glow.

With sanding, what you do is scratch the wood. Coarse sandpaper makes big scratches but removes uneven tool marks more quickly. As you progress to finer and finer grits of sandpaper the scratches get finer and finer until you can no longer see them. You remove more and more of the wood fibers that have been abraded so that they are proud of the wood surface. The difference is like looking at a reflection in a still pond or looking at it when there are ripples or even waves on the pond. Now you can see the subtle color and pattern variation that makes wood so attractive. When you then apply a finish to the wood you fill in more of the voids between the wood fibers and get even more of a view of the underlying beauty of the wood. Now its surface is like that still pond and the light is reflected to give a true picture of the grain and color.

Life is a bit like that. The more we refine our skills, the more accurately they reflect nature’s ideal which lies deep within us and which is so familiar and pleasing when fully expressed.

Many find sanding not particularly enjoyable and some of this may be due to not taking proper precautions. My rule of thumb is to wear my dust mask every time I enter my shop. Fine particulate dust, and it is always around even in the cleanest of shops, can go deep into the lungs. It is an irritant and may be a carcinogen. I know many long time woodworkers who have a chronic productive cough and respiratory problems. Allergies to wood dust can also be a problem and the first exposure may be the most important. Thus, as a physician who took care of many patients with chronic lung disease, safety first makes sense to me. I find that if I just have the habit of donning my dust mask first thing and keeping it on the whole time I am in the shop, I never seem to have any problem from exposure to the copious clouds of dust generated by my sanding and use of other power machinery. It’s like putting your seat-belt on when you get in the car. After a while you don’t even think about it.

I had a friend who ran an auto repair shop when I lived in Newport News, Virginia. It was an old fashioned, service oriented operation where you could leave your car and use the old clunker owned by the shop until your car was ready to be picked up, a service I found very valuable. In the shop was a sign on the wall which said: “If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, how will you ever find time to do it over again.

So, in wood finishing, get it right the first time. One thing that is important is to keep striving to use better and better tool technique. The more skilled you are with your sharp tools, the less sanding you will have to do to the surface. This means that your project will go faster. While sanding repairs a rough surface, it takes time and patience. Mastery of tool technique just comes with practice and knowledge. Fortunately today there are so many sources of information for the woodworker that poor technique is really a matter of choice, rather than necessity. In times past you would have to apprentice yourself to a master woodworker and spend years to learn the techniques. Now you can purchase a book, video or DVD or even go on line to the internet to get all the knowledge you can ever need and then some.

As you progress in your woodworking activities you may want to consider a dust collection system for your shop. Being on a limited budget and tools being very expensive I was a long time getting one. I watched ads in the Penny-saver every week and one day found a used dust collection system for sale. It turned out that it was another doctor who wanted to sell it and he lived just a mile or so from my house. When I went to see it he admitted that he had never used it. Consisting of a 50 gal. drum with the filter inside and a separate impeller in a housing with a two horse power electric motor attached, The 220 volt cord for the motor had an end which did not fit the plugs in my shop. I wasn’t sure that I knew how to get this thing working and indicated some reservation. He was also selling a contractor’s trim saw that caught my attention. I needed one, since my radial arm saw had died on me. When I expressed some interest in the saw, for which he was not asking much money, he said that if I bought the saw he would throw in the dust collection system for free. That clinched the deal.

Now, I do cabinet work, but am not much on carpentry. They are two different skills. However, I had a friend who did general contracting who had been getting me to help him learn to turn wood. I asked his advice and he actually ended up building me a platform for the dust system mounted on casters so the system could be rolled up to different machines in the shop. He would not take anything for his efforts, the real friend that he is.

I mounted the drum and the motor and impeller above it. The wiring was simple and only required a new plug that fit my wall sockets. Now I had to connect the impeller to the drum. The fittings took a seven inch duct. This is a non-standard size as most dust collection hoses are four inches in diameter. One day I was walking through Home Depot and spied a galvanized stove pipe connector which had three joints which could be turned to different angles to simplify fitting one pipe to another even though one was offset from the other. It was all of $7 and much cheaper than any solution I had been able to come up with.

With a little duck tape I was in business except for one thing. The filter bag to catch the fine dust was missing. I called a commercial company, which said it would be happy to make me one for $275. Talking to my contractor friend again, he suggested taping a pair of panty hose to the impeller dust outlet. This is the reason you see the hose adorning my dust collector. It may not be perfect but it works well enough for now.

Just one other safety note. A twenty dollar pair of mickey mouse hearing protectors is a lot cheaper than hearing aids. In Newport New where I practiced medicine the major employer was the shipyard. Steel edges are prepared for welding by use of a chipping hammer. You can imagine the noise of such a hammer on a two story piece of plate steel. Eighty percent of the retirees from that shipyard had permanent hearing impairment. Shop machines are noisy. I want to be able to hear my grandchildren clearly so I always wear ear muffs when exposed to loud noises. We are setting the stage for another generation of the hearing impaired with the use of leaf blowers and lawn mowers without hearing protectors. Do it now and you won’t have to repent in leisure, to paraphrase Socrates.

The point of this is that it is not how much money you throw at something. As a researcher for many years I became convinced that there was an inverse relationship between the research funding and the quality of the ideas it produced. What we are really after is creativity. There is an infinite amount of that in all of us. When we have a technique to harness that creativity, then we can do just about anything.