Poplar Bowl-working on the foot

Hi Everyone,

Well, it's a lovely day outside-Minnesota summers are wonderful. This is perfect turning weather and what do we do when the weather is good?:

Make wood round!!

Excellent, you're all beginning to get the hang of this.

Ok, the poplar bowl is finished and here's how that went:

This is the bowl with the finish dried and in place. The finish went on very well and dried without incident (keeping two curious cats away helped this process). I took it down to the wood shop and placed in back on the lathe and polished with with a green nylon kitchen pad and then I buffed it with wax. I'm very pleased with it:

The last thing we have to do is to shape and varnish the foot of the bowl. Here is a photo of the bowl on the lathe. I'm going to take it off and flip it over and turn the bottom. To do that I"ll remove the Nova chuck from the lathe:

This is the Nova chuck:

And I'll take off the jaws and replace them with these pie-shaped jaws. These will screw on:

This entire contraption is called a Cole jaw set. I'll place the bowl between the white rubber stoppers and then tighten the jaws. This will hold the bowl on the Nova chuck and then I can re attach the whole thing back on to the lathe:

Here's the bowl in the jaws:

 And here it is back on the lathe:

This area of the foot is going to be re-turned. I want to narrow the foot a little and turn the bottom flat so there aren't any places for moisture to collect:

Here is the bowl about 10 minutes later. It's ready to be removed from the lathe:

Before I take it off, I'll place my maker's mark on the bottom with a small, sharp veiner tool, the same one I accidentally marked my hand with a few weeks ago:

It's done. Time to take it upstairs for a final coat of varnish:

I've emailed the new owner and these bowls will be moving on to their new homes this weekend. I'll post final photographs tomorrow.

____________________

It's time to turn my attention to the art pieces and this is what we'll do next.

Stay tuned,

VW