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This pair of bowls came from some local Siberian elm that my wife bird dogged for me a few blocks away from the house. I roughed these out back in May (here's the thread) and finished them a couple weeks ago. (They both still need buffing, but I'm in no rush, so I'm letting the finish sit for a while before I buff them.) I've been putting off taking photos of these because the mama bowl is too big for my photo tent. I finally decided to heck with it, I wanted to show them to someone.
The baby bowl ended up at 12 3/4" wide by 1 1/2" tall. Real simple form with just the figure in the wood doing the real work. This was a piece of crotch wood, but I didn't get the feathering centered very well, and it only showed up in the baby bowl. The finish is 3 or 4 coats of Formby's Tung Oil finish. I'll buff and wax it sometime between now and the next show.
The mama bowl is 18" by 4". It's the biggest one I've done so far. These are obviously not gallery-quality photos, since the bowl is a bit too big for my backdrop. The pics will still get the idea across. (I really need a bigger backdrop. I have a 4' x 4' photo tent that I've never used because I don't have a good backdrop for it. Maybe I need to do the trick I've seen on SMC ages ago and just make some big gradient JPG files and get them printed on one of the wide format printers at Kinkos.) This one has the same finish as the little one. Oh yeah, the crackes were filled with black epoxy.
And one shot of the happy family...
I've got another pair about this size that are roughed out and dried. I'm just giving myself a bit of a break before tackling them. Once it dried, this wood dulled my tools faster than anything I remember turning, and even though the roughouts were very dry, the wood moved a lot from stress release as I finish turned it. I finish turned the outside of the big bowl one evening, and when I went back out to the shop the next night, there was over 3/4" of an inch in variation in the rim. I had planned to make it kind of chunky (a la Jeff Bower) but by the time I got the round again, the walls ended up about 3/8" to 1/2" thick. By then it was getting pretty flexible, and with all the cracks it had, I didn't get too heroic about perfect finishing cuts. I spent a lot of time with the 80 grit gouge to get them smooth, especially on the big one.
Now all I've gotta do is find someone who wants to buy a bowl that's too big to fit on a shelf.
Comments and critiques are welcome, as usual.
The baby bowl ended up at 12 3/4" wide by 1 1/2" tall. Real simple form with just the figure in the wood doing the real work. This was a piece of crotch wood, but I didn't get the feathering centered very well, and it only showed up in the baby bowl. The finish is 3 or 4 coats of Formby's Tung Oil finish. I'll buff and wax it sometime between now and the next show.
The mama bowl is 18" by 4". It's the biggest one I've done so far. These are obviously not gallery-quality photos, since the bowl is a bit too big for my backdrop. The pics will still get the idea across. (I really need a bigger backdrop. I have a 4' x 4' photo tent that I've never used because I don't have a good backdrop for it. Maybe I need to do the trick I've seen on SMC ages ago and just make some big gradient JPG files and get them printed on one of the wide format printers at Kinkos.) This one has the same finish as the little one. Oh yeah, the crackes were filled with black epoxy.
And one shot of the happy family...
I've got another pair about this size that are roughed out and dried. I'm just giving myself a bit of a break before tackling them. Once it dried, this wood dulled my tools faster than anything I remember turning, and even though the roughouts were very dry, the wood moved a lot from stress release as I finish turned it. I finish turned the outside of the big bowl one evening, and when I went back out to the shop the next night, there was over 3/4" of an inch in variation in the rim. I had planned to make it kind of chunky (a la Jeff Bower) but by the time I got the round again, the walls ended up about 3/8" to 1/2" thick. By then it was getting pretty flexible, and with all the cracks it had, I didn't get too heroic about perfect finishing cuts. I spent a lot of time with the 80 grit gouge to get them smooth, especially on the big one.
Now all I've gotta do is find someone who wants to buy a bowl that's too big to fit on a shelf.
Comments and critiques are welcome, as usual.