Nut bowl continued

Hi Everyone,

Well, I went downstairs and continued working on the nut bowl from yesterday.

The edge was very difficult to turn--I had a lot of tearing in the end grain and this happens when doing this type of turning. It takes very sharp tools and a lot of patient, slow shaving of the wood grain to smooth it down and that's what I did:

Taking this from rough to a finished edge took almost 3 hours of turning. It still needs finish sanding but the hard part of the edge turning is done. Whew!

With the bottom and sides done, I flipped it over and marked off the sections for the nut and the shell sections of the bowl. As the volume of the shells is always greater than the whole nuts themselves, this part of the bowl has to have a greater volume. Here is the blank with preliminary markings on the face:

The same problems that plagued the outside of the bowl are apparent inside the bowl as well and so this is taking a lot of work to hollow out. Here is a photo of the bowl after about 45 minutes of turning:

This next photo shows the bowl with the outside section nearly complete:

This took a lot of cutting and scraping with a specialized scraper to get it smoothed down. The surface is smooth but will require sanding to complete it and I'm not relishing the thought of my fingers sanding this thing as is spins. Thank heavens there are no areas of torn grain or gouges to deal with.

Lastly, here is a photo of the edge of the bowl:

The tools are beginning to dull and I'm hungry so I'm going to stop and get some lunch. When I come back I'll hollow out the center and finish the edge of the inside section. Once that's done, I'll be able to begin the finishing process. So we still have a ways to go.


More later,
VW