Snow today--good day to get down to the wood shop and make something!!

Hi Everyone,

Well, it's getting cold again and the weather folks tell us that the Twin Cities is about to get clobbered by a snow storm:

Well bring it on--time to get down to the wood shop and go to work!! Yea baby!!

More laminated bowls-Discussion and Plans

For those of you who follow the blog regularly, you'll know that I got a giant pile of hickory as a Christmas present last year and I've been working on using it up. That means using that wood as efficiently as possible so I've been doing a lot of laminating of late. My latest two efforts revolve around
using up some of the larger flat boards and some of the small pieces that I have so we're going to make a medium-sized salad bowl and a nut bowl. Here's how:

Salad bowl

When I laminate wood I generally orient the flat face of the individual wood pieces vertically because I  really love the way that this type of laminated block looks. It emphasizes the grain and because laminated blocks are made of separate pieces of wood, I can play around with grain patterns and color. This time however, I'm going to orient the faces horizontally like a stack of pancakes.

So I've dug into the wood pile and extracted several hickory boards on the basis of the width of the board and it's color:

And I'm going to add a section of walnut that will become the rim of the bowl.

Next, we're going to cut these boards into 11 1/2" wide sections on the table saw:

After several minutes of measuring and cutting I had my bowl blank ready to go. It's going to consist of three layers of hickory and a top layer of walnut for the rim:

I'm going to take this inside and glue it later on today. I think this will result in a very cool looking bowl.

While I was at it I came across that piece of monkey puzzle wood I got for Christmas and I cut it into medium-sized blanks that will eventually become a pair of bowls for some lucky person:

Monkey puzzle wood (and no, I don't know why it's called that) is a tree that grows in tropical regions and this particular piece came from Florida. It's supposed to be very irritating wood to work with but so far so good. We'll see what happens.

Next, since I wasn't completely frozen through, I decided to take some of the small pieces of hickory that I have and make a blank to make a nut bowl out of.

Hickory is a wonderful wood. The color ranges from butter yellow to deep browns, greens, and even wine reds and pinks and it's ideal for any type of wood turning. It's also great for laminations because the color varies so much. So it's a very good wood and it also has a wonderful scent. My shop smells great.

I cut up the smaller pieces and assembled them and didn't quite have enough pieces to make the blank as wide as I needed it so I cut more hickory and then I remembered a very thin piece of rosewood that I bought last year:

...and I cut it down and added it to the bowl blank:

Even though this is a very thin piece of wood, it was hard to cut it on the table saw.


Here is the bowl stack at present:

Once this is glued up, it will make a very nice nut bowl.

Since it's beginning to get really cold, I'm going to stop and take the laminating blanks inside so they can warm up. Hickory is a very dense wood and if it's too cold, the glue won't dry so everything has to warm up to at least 65 degrees before I can laminate it. That's ok as I think it's time to stop and get something hot to drink.

I'm going to glue up at least one of the bowl blanks tonight, probably the nut bowl. As soon as I'm ready to put it on the lathe, I'll let you know with another posting.

And another bit of news: I found out I'm on the dean's list at school--not bad for a wood shop critter!! I think I'll reward myself by going out and buying some red-colored wood!

Thanks for stopping by for a visit. Come back again soon as we always have more adventures in the wood shop.  I'll see you soon.

VW