The Maple Salad Bowl Project, continued: Shaping the Foot with Cole Jaws

 Hi Everyone,

Well Happy May Day to everyone here-I hope you're all having a nice day. Now that the music box is finished and everything is working properly again it's time to finish the maple salad bowl.

Let's talk about bowl feet-this is the part of bowl that sits between the bowl and the surface it sits on, in this case a table. They can be simple or very elaborate. They can be turned into the shape of a ring or carved into tiny feet. But what they all have in common is that they have to hold the bowl up without tipping over or wobbling so whatever is in it, doesn't fall out. And they add a more refined appearance to the bowl. 

The foot on this bowl was added separately to create both  foot and to add a strong attachment point for the lathe while I was hollowing it out. Now that this is done it's time to remove some of the height of the foot so it sits closer to the table top and to clean it up and put on the finish.

To do this I used a set of Cole Jaws so let's look at some photos now:

Cole Jaws are wedge-shaped aluminum jaws that attach to the body of a chuck, in this case my large Nova chuck.

 The jaws also come with a set of rubber bumpers which screw into the screw holes on the faces of the jaws:

 So when I place the bowl onto the jaws and close them the bumpers hold the bowl and then this entire thing is mounted on the lathe for turning:

Here is the bowl mounted on the lathe. You can see the bumpers in place. I had done several minutes of turning to make sure the bowl was spinning correctly and it was securely attached. And it worked!

The speed limit for this set up is 600 rpm but with my recent experience with everything not working properly I turned it a 350 rpm. It took a little while but I managed to remove about 3/8" of wood from the foot. I sanded it to 320 grit and decided to stop there:

Here it is with a coat of salad bowl finish on it. This turning for this project is finished:

I'm going to add several more coats of salad bowl finish to it then flip it over and polish it.  I'll post completion photos in a couple of days.

 

VW