Woodturners. Lets see those woodturnering projects

11.5”x5.5” bowl. I laminated walnut and ash rings for a set of stacking bowls. This bowl is from the largest blank.

 

12” wide, 3” deep walnut fruit bowl. This was requested by a friend who loves walnut and specifically asked for interesting grain and texture.

I don’t usually turn bowls with the pith running through it but this piece had a unique combination of the pith from a branch alongside some sap wood and irregular grain patterns so hopefully they’ll like it.

I got the idea for the rim shape from a fruit bowl TurboDiesel turned and gave our mom. I like that style rim he did on that bowl and wanted to try something similar:

 

Finally finished - Five nesting walnut and ash laminate bowls. I was trying to figure out how to avoid waste without a coring system.

I used one 12”x12” laminate of ash and maple to make the five rings I laminated for the bowl blanks and a 2” walnut piece was glued on the bottom of each blank for the bowl bottoms.
This was a long difficult process. I cut out the rings for the three largest bowls on my bandsaw because I was getting nowhere using my saber saw. These rings were then glued back together but those junctions introduced areas on the inside and outside of each bowl that chipped out easily. Lots of fixing cracks with ca glue and filling voids with five minute 2 part epoxy.

It was a good experiment, but one I won’t repeat with this many layers.

 

Awesome BrianK ....I won't show these to my wife or you will have to make another set! lol

 

Very nice Brian. Looks like you have figured it out.

 

A cigar ashtray for a friend at church who smokes cigars. Poplar on top of walnut with a 3” stone puck liner in the bottom:

 

Gorgeous!

 

I don’t know how I never heard of it before, but I just stumbled on some “bowls from boards” videos when one randomly popped up on my YouTube feed last week. So I watched a few, made a jig for my tool rest from scraps of hardwood and MDF

and turned one from an old piece of table top I was repurposing.

It’s a pretty cool method.

 

13” diameter, 4 1/2” tall bowl, top ring is mahogany, middle is hard maple butcher block, bottom is walnut.

 

BrianK ...now you are just showing off!! LOL

Another beautiful piece of art!!

 

Thanks lol!

I’ve been doing this for 18 months now and I’m still like a little kid full of wonder that these things turn out so well now.

 

BEAUTIFUL!

 

On Wednesday I cut three rings from a 13” piece of acacia butcher block countertop and glued them up into a bowl blank and put them in the press (a repurposed fruit press) overnight.

Last night I turned that resultant “bowl-from-a-board” bowl blank on my lathe.

Result - 13” wide, 4” tall acacia butcher block bowl.

I love the look of acacia, especially in the butcher block pieces. And the bowl that results from using it for a bowl-from-a-board is really distinct and remarkable.

And acacia has biblical significance, as Moses used it for much of the construction of the Ark of the Covenant.

 

Another beauty!

I love the press for a clamp = perfect!!
That's using the old noggin.

 

Thanks.
I searched for options for a bowl press and found press screws for a homemade clamp, but I would have had to construct the entire press from scratch:


I found a complete fruit press on Marketplace for $25 and repurposed in instead. Works great.

 

Again...Beautiful!

 

I’ve made two bowls now with a top ring of mahogany, from some mahogany cut offs a friend gave me.

I consider mahogany to be the top shelf wood type. It’s beautiful when finished with a warm reddish sheen and incredibly easy to work with and sand, and very stable. It doesn’t “move” once it’s finished - it doesn’t twist, curl, bend or crack.

It’s also a protected species now and imports are restricted so I just didn’t think I could afford any.

I struck pay dirt today however, after fruitlessly searching Marketplace for weeks for some locally - at an affordable price. Any commercial sources I’ve found locally are charging $9 per board foot - or more - for it.

A small local independent fine furniture maker had a Facebook Marketplace ad for hardwoods and included sapele (an African tree related to mahogany) among them so I made an appointment with him today to go see what he had available as well as pricing. He has his own sawmill and wood kiln and processes many different types of domestic hardwoods. He said there was a $100 limit, you had to buy at least $100 worth of wood.

That seemed kind of elitist but I understand why now. He works full time in his wood shop, had lots of domestic and exotic woods lining his walls, and doesn't have time to cater to guys looking for just one special board.

When I got there I asked him if he happened to have any real mahogany besides the sapele (“sapele mahogany”).

He did, 35bf of genuine (Brazilian?) mahogany he bought from a widow whose husband was a woodworker and collected it. Apparently this guy has had it in his wood shop for a number of years because it was marked at $4.40/ bf and he honored that, so I bought all 35bf.

Here it is on the left, next to all the sapele mahogany I've been able to find on Marketplace over the last couple weeks on the right in the photo.

As you can see in the photo I’ve already processed several pieces of sapele as well as one old piece of mahogany I brought home earlier into uniform flat square boards I can use to cut rings for more bowls. I’ll do likewise with all of it eventually.

The sapele gets a lot darker with age apparently, but so does mahogany.

I found the tallest 10’ sapele board on the right in the photo on Marketplace. It was sold to me by a 78 year old guy who inherited it recently from an uncle who hoarded different wood types. He said he remembered storing this particular sapele board in his uncle’s garage when he was a teenager 60 years ago.

So I have enough genuine mahogany and sapele mahogany now to last me ... for a long time lol.

In my dotage I am becoming a crotchety old small scale wood hoarder. In a relatively brief period I’ve acquired more wood than I’ll ever use in this life, the majority of it free.

 

You do awesome work. Do you sell any? If not, you should.

 

Thanks. Honestly I’m just a hobbyist and I’ve only been using a wood lathe for 18 months. I usually give the stuff I make to family and friends but I’ve been getting asked to make specific things now too so I am occasionally taking commissions. But it was never my goal to try to make money at it.

Recently a local college admissions director asked me if I’d be willing to make a number of items from a huge walnut crotch log from a tree taken down last summer to make room for an addition to his admissions office. The tree was ancient and had sentimental to him and staff. So I did accept that commission and I was working on resawing it today. I’m going to put these boards in a 5 gallon bucket with silicon gel drying beads so they’ll be ready to turn this month:

 

Maple, ash, hickory and padauk bowls: