My first green wood bowl

Rob Keeble

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Location
GTA Ontario Canada
Hi All

Well watching the spinny guys here gets frustrating if you are a doer rather than a talker.:D

So when I went to the garden rubish recycling dump the other day I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time. Got a neat wood haul and amongst the various pieces was a bunch of this stuff.Cross section of wood branch.jpgview of green wood bark.jpg

So with that attrative grain pattern and color I decided to have a quick go at turning a small green bowl.

All went well on the roughing and hollowing out. Then took the bowl and put it in the chuck with the chuck expanding out to support the bowl while I finished of the tennon on the bottom.

other side of green wood bowl.jpgFirst green wood ring bowl.jpg

One catch on the base and voila one split bowl and pieces. :( Might glue up and keep as a momento of my first green wood turning.

Anyone here got an idea of what wood this is. Something i have never seen before. It has a fluorescent green yellow color and it is almost like a hologram is when you turn it against the light.

Looked up my identifying wood book but nothing near this. I suspect it is a shrub or bush of some sort but the real thick piece i have is about 5 inches diameter.

Pictures dont do the color of the wood justice at all.

Well free wood and off to try again. Now I can see why you guys buy those hook bowl gouges.:rofl: And yes this is addictive.:D
 
Better than a lot of other first attempts, Rob. :thumb: Like a lot of folks (me included), you're starting out with a difficult form. The undercut rim is challenging for anyone. (It indicates a latent desire to turn hollow forms, IMHO.) :D

I'd glue it together and put it on a shelf. In a year or so, you'll really get a kick out of looking at it and seeing how much you've learned.
 
I believe that is Osage Orange you have there. You did a great job on your first piece. At least until you had your catch. Should have had the tail stock up as well. You'll get it done next time.
 
I believe that is Osage Orange you have there. You did a great job on your first piece. At least until you had your catch. Should have had the tail stock up as well. You'll get it done next time.


Thanks Doug,:thumb::clap: turns out to be exactly what it is when i looked up the wood.

For those interested here is a site where they define it very well. My color and bark is a dead match. Even the sap wood helped me id it after Doug pointed me in the right direction.

Thanks for all the comments guys this was a quick experiment to try show off the wood color to ascertain what it is.

Its only about 1 and 3/4 diameter and i found it very hard to get inside the tiny bowl with a huge bowl gouge i have.
Guess there will have to be some more tools on my list.:rofl:
 
Anyone here got an idea of what wood this is. Something i have never seen before. It has a fluorescent green yellow color and it is almost like a hologram is when you turn it against the light.

[...] I suspect it is a shrub or bush of some sort but the real thick piece i have is about 5 inches diameter.

Pictures dont do the color of the wood justice at all.

Rob, your pictures and description closely match the wood from the smoke bush in our side yard.

My wife trimmed the (large-ish) shrub for the first time last year, and I was quite surprised by the "fluorescent green yellow color" that appeared when the limbs split down their length - which they started to do within a day or two. The sap that oozed from the cut ends was very sticky ... hopefully the sap and the "auto-splitting" will be lessened if I do some planned cutting in the winter. (?)

In stark contrast, the limbs that my wife trimmed from our giant pussy willow "shrub" at the same time lay on the lawn/driveway quite happily for a week or two with no signs of cracking (and no sticky sap) whatsoever. Go figure!
 
Kerry I think Frank is correct. The turned piece is Osage Orange for sure.

Yup its a keeper, sits in the family room in the niche all on its own. Still intend finishing it after i get the courage to load it up with some CA glue and stabalize it. Have to fill a little edge, but i really like it for the time it took and the free wood.

I have a few more pieces that i since sealed up and are waiting to be turned.

I lost a lot of interest in my lathe since i found out how poor its accuracy is. Have since shimmed the tailstock and will give it another go when my bench and other projects are over.

Enjoyed building my Longworth chuck but when it wobbled so much it was a bit off putting. I found if i leave something like that alone till i get over the disappointment I then can get back on the horse at a later date.:rofl::thumb:
 
Kerry I think Frank is correct. The turned piece is Osage Orange for sure.

Enjoyed building my Longworth chuck but when it wobbled so much it was a bit off putting. I found if i leave something like that alone till i get over the disappointment I then can get back on the horse at a later date.:rofl::thumb:

Rob,
Down in Texas we call that Bodark... I cut some from a tree in my stepfather's cow lot that must have been standing 50-100 years... they don't usually get to be huge trees, but this one is nearly 3' diameter... must be all the cow fertilizer??:rofl:

I read your thread on the Longworth... can't imagine what would cause wobble... about same time you did yours I made one for my Jet1442... it's about 13 3/4 diameter... (Just barely clears the ways)... the tutorial called for a dedicated faceplate, but I didn't have one I could dedicate, so I put an extra tenon on mine that will fit in the Barracuda II chuck... I get very little wobble... I made mine from a piece of furniture grade plywood that was an old table top... the plywood was pretty solid all the way through, but if you used CDX or some lesser grade of PW, you may have some voids in the veneer layers... that might cause the wobble.

Before retiring, I worked for an export packing company that used CDX plywood for all the boxes...we bought from Georgia Pacific because their warehouse was one or two blocks away... when the price went sky high, we started looking for an alternate source and found some from Brazil... it was metric measure instead of the standard U.S. measure for thickness, but we found there were far fewer voids in the veneers.
 
Chuck, after Chas mentioned it i tried mounting mine in my one way chuck using the tennon i had made. Still wobbled. Problem i saw with this idea was getting the tennon to the bottom of the chuck consistently. Then when it was mounted i still tried to smooth out the base plate. By the way i used multilayer Baltic Birch for my base plate and the final plate but still no real joy. So i will soon get a dedicated mount for it and try mounting the base plat to that. If that doesnt solve it, its going in file 13 and start again with some other base plate and dedicated base. There are times i think its simply my whole lathe setup. I am going to test that by trying to make some of those bird houses Bernie does. If i cannot get one of those small items turned accurately them boom, i think scrap metal.:rofl:
 
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