Fairly Large Elm Bowl

Dave Hoskins

Member
Messages
5,252
Location
Parker County, Texas
This is the first elm bowl out of the kiln from all those logs I brought up a little while back. I do like it's color. There's just a bit of spalting here and there in it. The wood did have a small area of burring in it that I finally got out of it. Took a bunch of sanding but was worth it. It's 14 1/4" in diameter, 4 1/4" high, and has a depth of just over 3". As usual for me it has a rather heavy base. But, the bowl only weighs 4 pounds so the heavy base is not too cumbersome. Pretty much as I usually do the wood received two coats of walnut oil for sealing and then was finished with a walnut oil/shellac mixture. Hope you all like it.

 
Dave,
That's a nice bowl, I like everything about it.

How do bowls this size sell in your area? I know everything's bigger in Texas, but I don't find the really big bowls to sell well here. My larger
bowls are usually in the 10-12 inch range and do okay for me.
My lathe won't turn a 14 1/2 bowl over the ways and the outboard turning is just too funky and scary for me to try.... I can turn
my headstock at 45, 90, etc, but don't like the tool rest extension... I have a cole jaws extension that I can't put over the ways so I do have to rotate 45 degrees to use it. And I do use it when I remove the bottoms off my 10, 11 and 12 inch bowls... very carefully.

I tend to leave bottoms a little heavier too... often times when I'll try to get the bottom nice and thin, I wind up with a very pretty funnel, so I just leave them heavier and that also makes the bowls a little more stable. I also leave the walls a little thicker... maybe 1/4+ inch...
 
That's a good looking bowl. The proportions on it seem to work fairly well, and the shape should be usable for a lot of different things, it's deep enough for salad, shallow enough for fruit and good looking enough to sit in the table by itself.
 
Thanks fellers! Chuck, it's funny that you asked about bigger bowls selling here. I only go to one craft fair a year, and I will sell 12 of the big bowls if I have 12 there. But, my biggest sales for bigger bowls come from most of my regular online customers. I don't sell much out of my shop locally because my shop is not open to the public for insurance reasons. I do have friends and family come over and buy pieces now and then, but they aren't gonna sue me. My biggest sellers are like you, the 9-12" range. I have made a couple of fancy funnels or so myself. Rather aggravating to say the least. So, thicker and heavier bottoms for me. I usually have my walls, depending on the wood the bowl is turned from at about 1/2" and sometimes a little bit more. Mike Mahoney told me the biggest demise of a wood bowl is being dropped and cracking. A tad bit heavier walls and base will help prevent that. Cole jaws, if used properly are wonderful. I have several different shapes of the rubber gripper things to help with them. I failed to mention a good use for this bowl is also as a popcorn bowl.
 
I use my cole jaws and duct tape to make sure the bowls stay on the jaws... after that one bowl came out of my longworth chuck and careened off my face, I make sure they're secure before I mess with them.. maybe a little gun shy now??

And I'm not all that fond of popcorn... the girls in my last office were always - always - burning it in the microwave and it stunk up the office to high heaven.... plus my last year of high school I worked in a movie theater doing the concession stand... likely I've popped a couple of thousand or so pounds of popcorn.

Only people who come to my shop are fellow turners that know where, what and how to move around in it... I sell at my Farmer's market downtown during the summer and on ETSY.
 
I can see where you might have a distaste for popcorn! Wow! I always thought those longworth jaws were an accident waiting to happen. I never used one, just seemed very unreliable safety wise to me. I have two sets of cole jaws on their own chucks. 8" and 16". But after a piece comes off and tries to assault you, it can be nerve wracking. One gets off from me now and then but find all kinds of redneck ways to keep it from happening. On the cole jaws sometimes I put the tail stock extension in, then my drill chuck with a 5" sanding pad and maybe a 220 disc on it. I'll run that up to the bottom of the bowl for added stability while doing the major work. I'm sure others do that or something even better, but it's what I have on hand so I use it. Using a 220 or even finer disc minimizes the amount of wood that the disc sands off. Burnt popcorn does not smell good. uhuh But no matter what I am trying to get done, I do it the safest way I can. Turning is inherently a dangerous activity to start with. No sense making it more so. If what I am fixing to do does not feel right, I step back and reexamine what I am about to do. If it don't feel right, then it probably isn't. I'm on Etsy as well. That's where I got my online start. It makes up about 1/4 or so of my sales now. Good enough to stay there. Once customers become regulars, they just email me what they want and we bypass Etsy altogether. Saves on fees and such.
 
Very nice, looks a lot like the Japanese Elm I get a lot and love/hate, as dry it is hard as rock and hard to turn.

I gave up on all them holding doodads and set up a vacuum chuck system, I really like it, works great for me.

Cheers!
 
Thanks, Stuart! I had thought about a vac chuck, but that is as far as I got. I turn a fair amount of large bowls. 14,15, even up to 18". When I start a roughing out, the wood might weigh as much as 25 pounds or so. Not so sure how a vac chuck will work on big stuff. Might work well, I don't know. Elm? Hard? Not even. I honestly find it pretty soft wood compared to a lot of what I turn. I mainly turn pecan, oaks, and bodark (bois d arc, osage orange). Elm don't come close to them. But, softer can be good now and then, especially when I brought up to my log yard about 8 tons of it. All nice and green and wet.
 
Thanks, Stuart! I had thought about a vac chuck, but that is as far as I got. I turn a fair amount of large bowls. 14,15, even up to 18". When I start a roughing out, the wood might weigh as much as 25 pounds or so. Not so sure how a vac chuck will work on big stuff. Might work well, I don't know. Elm? Hard? Not even. I honestly find it pretty soft wood compared to a lot of what I turn. I mainly turn pecan, oaks, and bodark (bois d arc, osage orange). Elm don't come close to them. But, softer can be good now and then, especially when I brought up to my log yard about 8 tons of it. All nice and green and wet.

The only thing I use the vacuum chuck for is the finishing of the very bottom of the bowl, and even that 90% of it is done with the tailstock up holding it in place against the vacuum chuck. The vacuum chuck is used for just that nib at the end and maybe a final shearing cut to make sure the bottom looks nice, then sanding the very bottom of the bowl, the rest is done on the regular chuck.

The other thing the vacuum chuck is great for is if you have to return the bowl to the lathe, for example if it needs a bit more sanding, I had this happen the other day when I thought I was done, and put finish on a bowl only to find a really big tear out spot that I had somehow missed, I was able to return the bowl to the lathe on the vacuum chuck and then sand out the tear out so the bowl looks fine now.

You could not make me give up my vacuum chuck.

Cheers!
 
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