Making a drinking masur out of a Norwegian maple tree branch

Hi Everyone,

Well, it's been a long day in the shop. I was going to clean up and call it a day when I suddenly remembered my wedding anniversary is this month on the 22nd. I had planned to make my husband a present earlier in the summer and I completely forgot about it.

I have some large branches from a friend in St. Paul who cut down a large tree in his back yard in June and I've been wanting to turn something from them to test the turning characteristics of the wood. I decided to make my husband a drinking masur for our 32 wedding anniversary. Maple is great turning wood and since it's light in color, I could burn a message into the wood with a wood burning pen.

So I got my second wind and went back down to the wood shop and began working. Here we go:

Here is a section from one of the wider branches. I've drawn a line that I'm going to use to split the branch in half:

I love doing this:

And here is the branch after it's been split-I wore a lot of eye protection for this and so should you:

I must have gotten cut with a metal sliver and I was bleeding all over everything for a minute. My camera is covered with blood at the moment:

Here is the branch with a circle drawn on the surface. That brown strip is the heart wood and I'm going to remove that shortly:

Drilling a mortise on the blank to attach it to the Nova chuck:

And I'm turning it between centers. I'll begin at about 300 rpm as this is unbalanced:

This is the blank after about 5 minutes of turning. You can see it's beginning to round off:

In this photo I've removed a lot of the bark. I'm going to remove that button on the bottom and flatten the bottom:

In this photograph I've created a foot and a tenon so I can re-attach it to the chuck in a minute:

I've flipped it over and begun turning the inside of the bowl. This wood is turning like a champ. Absolutely no problems:

Here is the face of the bowl. I'm getting ready to hollow it out:

I put down the camera at this point and hollowed the whole thing out. It took about 45 minutes to hollow it and smooth the inside. When I was done with that I added a rim to the bowl. I'll add a message here in a day or two:

This is it just before I took it off the lathe:

These last two photos are the finish photos:

I'm going to let this dry and I may even get brave and microwave it to move that process along a bit. Then I'll add a message to the rim and thin varnish it with salad bowl varnish. So I'm not done with it yet.

Stay tuned,

VW