The Wedding Bowl continued...

Hi Everyone,

Well, I've taken the bischofia bowl out of the dry box and it looks good. It's still round and there are no cracks:

The foot of the bowl did shrink a little and the Nova chuck didn't quite fit into the recess you see in the photograph so I got one of my carving gouges and gently whittled away a bit until the chuck jaws fit inside:

So I finished hollowing it out and turned the exterior of the bowl a little and began sanding it and here it is at present:

It has the usual end grain problems to deal with and since it's a coarse wood, it will need a fair amount of smoothing which I'm going to mostly do today.

I'll be back in several days with completion photos and final notes on the project.

VW

Freezer Jam

Hi Everyone,

Yes, you read it right: freezer jam! I enjoy cooking and I love to make pickles, jam, etc, in the summer time and one of the best recipes for jam that I've come across is a very simple recipe on the cooking blog Recipe Girl. There is a recipe for peach freezer jam that I've made lots of time and since I had a large bowl of blue berries in the fridge I took part of the day off from turning to make some.

Here's a photo of part of the batch I made:

This is a low sugar jam that requires only 1 cup of sugar. I also used Ball Low Sugar-No Sugar pectin and got a really good set on the jam.

So that's what I did yesterday afternoon! Ok, back to the wood shop and the bischofia bowl.

See you later,
VW

The Pet Urn: Final Notes and Completion Photos

Hi Everyone,

The pet urn is done and here are a few final thoughts and photos:

This is the urn with the lid on top. It's made from black walnut with a lid out of rock maple. The volume of the urn is approximately 1 1/2cups (US) and it was made for a friend in the Netherlands who recently lost a much loved cat:

I used pvc plumbing fittings so the cap will screw on tightly:

This is the underside of the cap. You can see how it will screw into the body of the urn:

And this is the bottom of the urn. I drilled a 1 1/2" diameter recess into the bottom to accept a small round wooden disc with the cats name and birth and death dates inscribed in ink on the surface. An artist friend of mine is currently doing this for me and the disc hasn't been delivered back to me yet:

This is how the disc will fit into the bottom of the urn:

And this is a disc. When the inscribed disc comes back to me, I'll epoxy it to the underside of the urn and then give the entire bottom another coat of varnish:

Notes

Well, it was an interesting project and one that I hope will help my friend over her loss. The pvc plumbing parts were the most challenging part of the project as well as drilling the recess on the bottom. I think if I ever do another one of these I'll plan on placing the opening in the bottom of the urn instead of the top so I can use a larger diameter pvc fittings instead of the small ones I did use for the top. There was also some trial and error cutting down the fitting that I used for the lid but as these fittings are less than $1.00, it wasn't a disaster for me when I messed up the first fitting. If you have standard lathe tools, you'll find shaping the plastic very easy to do as it's rather soft. Do be careful of the threads as they are not very rigid and they can be easily damaged. As for the wood, it was very stable and a joy to turn and shape so I'm not foreseeing any problems with that in the future.

As soon as the inscribed disc comes back, I'll be mailing this to the Netherlands.
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What's next?

Well, I have the bischofia bowl to complete and I'll go down to the wood shop later today and take a look at it and get that finished. And I have to do something about the mosquitoes in my shop. I got clobbered by those little monsters yesterday and I'm scratching like crazy today. I'll get 'em!

And as for today, I'm in a cooking mode so I'm going to make homemade chili and some freezer jam.

Ok, see you later with the bowl posting.

VW