Spoons-making and finishing-Part 1

Hi Everyone,

This project has a lot of photographs so I'm going to do this in two postings.

Here we go:

I've selected a very clear, straight-grained piece of scrap maple for our project. It is a closed-cell wood meaning that the surface will be very smooth and food won't get caught on the surface. It is also a very strong piece of wood so our spoon will last a long time. In this photograph I've drawn an outline of a spoon:

This photograph shows only the bowl portion of it cut out. I leave the rest of the block intact until I'm finished carving and shaping the bowl. It's much easier to clamp it down or place it in a vise:

Many websites show people using a hook knife to hollow out the bowl and if you have the hand strength to do that, all the power to you. I have a hook knife that I just can't use so I've compensated for this by using several different carving gouges. The one on top I use for roughing out the interior of the bowl and the other two I use to smooth the interior of the bowl. I also use narrow gouges to make it easier to push the tool through the wood and the cutting edge of the gouge also fits better inside of the bowl while carving:

Here is the bowl. I've penciled in a line around the inside edge. I'm going to use that as a boundary line for the bowl:

...and I begin to cut out the inside. I take small bites of wood out with each cut of the gouge:

You can see in the photo that I'm cutting across the grain. It makes hollowing out the bowl easier and you'll find that you can cut the wood more cleanly this way:

Here we are about 15 minutes later. I've done the preliminary hollowing and I'm deepening the the rear of the bowl. I like the spoons to be deeper than the store bought spoons you see. This enables the spoon to be used for serving:

...and here is a photo of the gouge I'm using for this step:

In this photo the arrows show the direction of the cuts. This helps to deepen the bowl and to smooth out the edges:

Here I am deepening the front portion of the bowl. The wood in this area was particularly hard so I took a 1/2 wood chisel and gently removed this area with a mallet:

Here is the bowl several minutes later. The bowl is just about finished:

The bowl is done:

I've taken it out of the vise and now I'm going to take it over to the bandsaw and cut it out:

End of part 1. Go to the next posting to see the work on the handle and the finish photos.

VW