Walnut

Further digging into my pile of scraps that my friends have given to me... I present this walnut bowl. It's rather hard to tell in the pictures, as the camera did a good job of washing out the color, but it's actually a cut spanning both the dark heartwood (black walnut) and the sapwood. It made for a very nice blending effect on the inside of the bowl.


I forgot to measure this one before I gave it away, but my guesstimates put it at about 7 3/4 inches across, and 1 3/4 inches tall. It is finished with natural flavors of danish oil and polyurethane. One of the things I like most of this bowl, besides the grain, is the fact that there are next to no turning marks in it.

Walnut is one of my favorite woods to turn, and this is the first piece I've done in quite a while, as well as the first time I've turned walnut across the grain. The last time I did a bigger walnut piece, I didn't have as much experience or patience with woodturning as I do now, and while what I made is pretty, there is a huge difference in quality between then and now. But then I go and look up what professional turners are doing, and realize I have a long way to go.

Step by step

Yesterday as I was sorting boards out in preparation to glue them together into blanks, the idea came to me to show a little bit of a step-by-step of how I prepare and turn the majority of my bowls.

First, we need a board:
That should work. I got some more cedar from one of my friends at work, and we planed it down smooth and cut it into 8 inch squares. When I laminate boards together for cross-grain bowls, I start by lining all the pieces up the same way they were cut out of the board. This helps the grain to line up and flow with an uninterrupted look around the outside of the bowl. The straighter the grain is, the better the effect, but the more figured the grain, the more interesting the look.

I figure out which end I want to be the top of the bowl, and which one the bottom. Most of the time, I try to have the more solid and straight pieces at the top to add strength to the rim of the bowl, with figured and cracked pieces at the bottom, so the larger mass of wood there will help keep it together. It doesn't always work out that way. But, once I've decided, I start at the end that I want to be the top, and pick that piece up, and set it down on the next one. Then pick those two up, and set them on the next one, and work down accordingly, until it looks like this:
Looking at the end grain of the boards, it looks like it'll be a nice flowy piece. Once I'm happy with it, I mark the boards in a way that will help me remember how to orient them with the rest, and start gluing. I try to do one glue joint at a time, which helps keep the glue lines narrow. For this block as well, I'm also using a jig to line the two boards being joined with each other as well. It cuts down on the frustration of having the two boards slide around as you're trying to clamp them together.
Once the glue is set enough, (the glue I use has a clamp time of 30 minutes, though I wait an hour or more) I laminate the next board on, until I have the entire stack glued together. Then, I find the center, and glue on my faceplate block. That's so that when I mount the faceplate on the bowl blank, the screws are going into the cheap scrap wood, letting me use more of the project wood for the finished bowl.
In the picture, the big stack is Spanish Cedar, and the small single board is cherry. Once the glue dries fully, about 24 hours, I take the blanks out to the lathe, cut the corners off to make them octagons, (much faster and less scary than roughing out the squares) and start turning! Hopefully these will get turned on Sunday.

In progress

Today was lathe day. I got to try my hand at turning something a bit taller than I usually do, as well as turning one of a few pieces of walnut I've acquired.

Before:


And middle:

Just need to sand them and finish them.

A surprise for family

This weekend I went to Meadview for a fun filled weekend of motorcycle riding and sightseeing, and overall general vacationing. I tagged along with TC and Alex, and his sister, and we all stayed at their grandparents place. They've kind of adopted me, which is cool, and makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

Anyways, I decided it would be cool to make a bowl for them, as sort of a thank you. Rather than giving it to them in person, though, I devised a scheme, which everyone helped out on. I decided to plant the bowl somewhere while we were getting ready to leave, in hopes they wouldn't find it until we were all gone, so it would be a surprise.

Fun, yeah?

It was incredibly hard to keep it hidden until the last moment when I put it onto their coffee table, at which point, it was incredibly hard to hide my excitement. I was incredibly giddy riding away.

Anyways, the bowl:




When I started finishing the bowl, I did not like it. I thought the wood rot cavities combined with the bold grain made it too busy looking and overwhelming. My sister helped convince me to stick with it and finish it, and I figured if I still didn't like it, I'd bring another bowl turned from a similar piece of wood with less rot, and let everyone else decide. But once I put the gloss finish on it, all my reservations disappeared. I liked it, and was sure everyone else would, too. And they did.

The bowl is turned from my last piece of Spanish Cedar lumber, and was the piece I was most scared of turning, because it had so many voids in it from the rot. As such, the inside of the bowl isn't sanded as well as I usually try to do, and still has some turning lines in it. It is hard to tell, but the rim is interrupted in two spots by a long void, which made sanding even more difficult. It is 7 1/8 inches in diameter by 1 3/4 inches tall, finished with danish oil with a polyurethane gloss topcoat.

Lesson being: Don't stop working on something because you don't like it yet. Sometimes, it ends up being one of your favorite pieces by the time you're done.

Hey, some bowls!

So, I've finally gotten around to posting some finished work! Granted, these have been done for a week, but I've been too busy/lazy/absent minded (pick one) to spend 45 minutes taking pictures of them, then tweaking the images until I either can tolerate what I see on the screen compared to what's sitting next to me, or give up in frustration. It's what I get for having a cheap camera, I suppose. Just keep in mind most of my woodwork looks much better in person.

It seems like I say that every time.

Anyways, first we have an alder piece, a bowl made of two boards laminated together and turned in a cross-grain fashion. This piece is about 4 1/2 inches in diameter at the widest point, and 2 3/4 inches tall.

I really like how the grain on one side almost looks like the Firefox logo:


Next is a bowl made of cherry, from one of three pieces given to me from a friend. This bowl is already spoken for, going to the folks that gave me the blanks. I really like this one too, so it seems fitting. Solid cherry, turned cross-grain. 6 inches in diameter at the rim, and 1 5/8 inches tall.

I like how the grain came out:

Lastly, we have the last of my birch pieces, for now. A single birch board, cut and laminated, and turned cross-grain. 7 1/16 inches in diameter, and 1 1/2 inches tall. The bottom came out a little thicker than I usually like, but for some reason I was paranoid about turning it too thin. It adds a bit of weight to the bowl, though it does make it shallow.

I like the two tone grain:

And lastly, some works in progress:

Hope everyone (anyone?) likes these.

In progress:

Yup, finally attacked the lathe today. It was fun. More to come soon, hopefully.

Inspiration

More than a few people have been prodding me, so to speak to do more wood turning, making bowls and such on my lathe. The fact that one of my co-workers is giving me more and more wood to make stuff out of is evidence of this. In the end, though, I can't turn things, and feel good about what I make if I don't actually -want- to make it. And what makes me -want- to make something, is making it -for- someone, or making something that I know is going to be put to some sort of use, be it holding M&M's on a coffee table, or as decoration on someone's mantle. Not collecting dust on my shelf, like many of my bowls were until recently.

The majority of my bowls I gave to my sister, so she can sell them. I did this, because every time I looked at them, any motivation I might have had evaporates as I think "Well, anything I make is gonna end up on that pile anyways."

The good news is that I'm starting to feel like I want to turn "for the heck of it" again. It'll be good when I do, because I've got a pretty big pile of random pieces of wood growing under my desk. We'll see.

Boxy box

The way I've heard it is that you're not old until you start collecting flamingos, or something like that. They also say that memory loss is also one of the three signs of old age. (That's my excuse if I got the flamingo thing wrong.) But it is the flamingo thing that forms the basis for this post, as TC wanted me to make a box with a pink flamingo inside to give to her mother-in-law's mom's birthday.

We had decided on this some time ago. It wasn't until about two weeks ago that we realized "Oh, her birthday's coming up soon, we'd better hurry up and make the box!" I think that this has been a record turn-around time for me, especially given the problems I had with the hinges. (Note to self: Find a source for small decorative stainless steel screws. Brass is too soft for oak.)

And so, here is the box. It is solid 1/4" thick oak, (my wood of choice, it seems.) and it is finished with two coats of natural flavor polyurethane inside and out. Roughly 9 1/4" long by 5 3/4" wide and 2 3/8" tall.


Now to clear off my desk and start something else.

Introductory post, and what's on my desk at the moment.

Chances are if you're here I probably already know you and linked you here. At any rate, I like to build... stuff. The things I make range from industrial and functional objects to what could pass as art, encompassing various vocational fields. (Metalworking, woodworking, mechanical, electrical, and so on.) The problem with having such a spread focus on what I do, is that it's hard to share my projects on a community site like DeviantArt or the like. In short, I wanted a place where I could dump whatever it is I make all in a single place, regardless of what it is, and its stage of done-ness. Yes, a website would work best, but a blog would also work as well, in my opinion.

And so, Project Madness begins. I will be posting whatever it is I'm working on here, sometimes in-progress stuff (since I have a habit of cooking up several things at once) and sometimes just stuff that's done, hence the madness. Some bicycling related projects will be cross-posted from Flag Pedals as well, so if you read both blogs, you'll see it twice!

I'll also be working on putting together an "old stuff" posting, mainly of past projects that are posted on DeviantArt (mostly just the woodwork) just so my stuff is mostly in one place.

And now, have a picture of the projects on my desk at the moment! A box under construction, and bicycle rack decks.