Box elder-preliminary turn

Hi Everyone,

Today is just a lovely day here in Minnesota. There's no snow and it's sunny outside. Perfect for wood turning.

I decided to turn the smaller of the two bowl-shaped pieces of box elder today just so see what it's turning qualities are and to shape it some. Since it is an irregularly shaped piece of wood, I placed it firmly between centers and I also had to move the tool rest behind the tailstock to get it out of the way. I also turned it very slowly for safety's sake and to cut it gently.

Here we go:

Here you can see the initial set up I used. I cut away the sharp corners and edges that were protruding out from the rest of the blank:

This photo shows some initial shaping. You can see I've moved the tool rest in front of the tailstock where it usually is:

This is the blank about after about 10 minutes of turning. It's beginning to be rounded a little. Time to turn it over and begin cutting out the the inside of the piece:

Here you can see the same set up as before:

And again here we are about 10 minutes into the turning. My objective here is just to cut the piece down into a useable piece of wood:

This is a side view of the piece at present:

Notice the red-tinged shavings:

 Here we are at the moment:

This piece of wood is very wet and it needs to dry out some and stabilize so I'm going to soak it in Pentacryl for the next several days and then place it in several paper shopping bags and let it dry for 30 days. We'll return to it at Christmas time and make some decisions about how to turn it to take advantage of the lovely red streaks. The pieces I turned last night are going to join it.


And of course the wood shop is drowning in wood shavings. Time to sweep up and put some of the equipment away.

I have to work on the basswood platter next and I'll get to that late this week.

More later,

VW