Wedding Bowls, continued-The Bischofia Wood Bowl/discussion and plans

Hi Everyone,
I've had some lunch and I'm back.

Now, I'm going to turn a bowl out of bischofia wood. I got this blank a while back from Wood Turning Blanks 4U. I was looking at their wood inventory and bischofia wood showed up. I'd never heard of this type of wood before so I bought a 3"x12" blank and a smaller 3"x4" block and I decided to use them both as wedding presents for a young couple I know who are getting married later this year.

Here are the photos and discussion:

So here is the blank on the lathe. It weighs a ton as it's probably full of water. I've got it on a 6" face plate and I'm turning it between centers to help distribute the weight a bit:

Here is the blank with the side and face trued up. I turned the blank at about 350 rpm at this stage:

This wood is really wet. It came off in streamers and my t-shirt is damp:

And here it is turning on the lathe. I'm going to shape the exterior of the bowl as a reverse ogee shape and you'll be able to see that clearly at the end of this posting:

You can see how ragged the surface is. This wood is wet!

In this photo I've begun to shape the foot of the bowl. I've made it very wide at this point because I'm not sure just how wide I'm going to go with this:

I turned it for about 45 minutes and this is where it's at right now. It's hard  to see the colors and figure in this block-it looks really interesting. And ever though I've removed a lot of wood at this point, it's still really heavy:

 Here is a side view and you can see the ogee shape. I think at this point the bowl looks a little blocky  and I may remove more wood from the bottom third of the bowl to straighten out the curvature a little:

It's hot and I'm going to stop for the day. In order to keep it from drying out overnight, I've wrapped it in plastic and set it aside.

Ok, who wants to clean up??

See you all tomorrow,
VW