How I Make a Simple Spoon - Ryan Mooney

Ryan Mooney

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The Gorge Area, Oregon
[Original discussion thread is here. - VM]

Somewhat inspired by Neds unfortunate day and Vaughn's superlative "how to make a bowl" threads (and also avoiding doing more yardwork.. mostly avoiding doing more yardwork.. :rofl:) I figured I'd do a "how to spoon" thread. Standard disclaimers about not everything I do being the best/smartest/fastest apply, so C&C welcome and if you have a different/better/interesting/whatever way of doing something please lay it out (I'd especially be interested in seeing one of them spoon planes in action, I'd never heard of them before today and searching youtube I find more videos of infants getting fed with a spoon "like a planee.. zooom" than actual spoon planes :rolleyes:).

Piece of scrap pear from the offcuts from my slabbing adventure/burn pile
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Really roughly roughed on the bandsaw. Cut off all of the split pieces and picked the thickest looking part. I leave the bowl side a bit long if I'm going to lathe it (which I will with this one just because why not). This was cut with the same 3/4" blade I had on for slabbing (cut/back out cut..) so not really any curves :D
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Roughed on the lathe. I used a 1/2" spindle gouge to turn down the bulk of the handle, a 1.25" skew to clean it up a smidge and a 5/8" bowl gouge to turn the edges off of the bowl. I like using the bowl gouge for cuts like this cause its less likely to catch and follows a curve pretty well.
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Still lots of bark on the back, I'll deal with that next.
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Cut off the nubbin and used a hand plane to knock the back kinda flat so I can carve the bowl next.
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Figuring out how to hold it here is the hard part. I have the bowl wedges between the square dog and the holdfast with the other holdfast on the handle. The handle sat a bit shy of the bench at the back so I shoved a wedge under it to keep it flat. This also shows the first pass of gouge cuts. This is the only part where I use a mallet on the gouge, I'll do ~6 more cuts sideways to knock out the first bit of waste.
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From there its all paring cuts. I use my close had as a leverage point to control the cut depth and my rear hand (not shown cause its taking the picture.. but normally it would be on the handle :D) as the driver. Basically here I'm just working around the bowl working it down. I find that using 1/4 - 1/2 the width of the chisel works better than trying to make to big of cuts in one pass (it could be the middle 1/2 though).
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Continues.
 

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More paring cuts. Here I've raised a series of shavings and am preparing to cut them off. I took a lot of paring cut pictures, I'll spare you the rest of them :D
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I really need to get around to just putting some leather jaws on my vice :rolleyes:
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More paring cuts, again I use my close hand to control the cut depth and the rear hand to drive the chisel. Hint: take a stone and break the edges of the chisel or you'll have more of that red stuff contaminating your work problem.
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Check the thickness fairly often, I just use my fingers, exactly correct isn't critical, but you don't want to go through :D
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Controlling the cut depth/extent with my near hand, here I'm actually doing a "slicing" cut kind of towards the upper part of the picture.
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Clean it up the back with a file.
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Usually around here I decide that I need to cleanup the inside of the bowl a smidge. Yes that's a shaving, fine cuts here make sanding easier later.
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A little work on the handle, mostly bevel down paring work to get rid of the bark and shape it. I did the same on the flat on the other side.
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Sand 120 grit, 220 grit walnut oil saturate wait 5 and wipe off then 320 grit followed by another wick walnut oil wipe.
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Not my nicest or fastest (or nicest/fastest for that matter) spoon but not bad for a piece of firewood :D. Total time about 1:30 including time taking pictures.
 

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