I did all this yesterday but forgot to post it-here's an update:
I decided to narrow down the mid and top portion of the urn a little bit both for aesthetic reasons and to see if I could minimize or eliminate the cracks near the top of the urn. This is a photo of how it looked before hand:
And here it is afterwards. I decided to sand the surface while I was at it and got a very nice result. It's very smooth to the touch...
...but the cracks are still there. They are shallower but still visible:
So I decided to fill them with glue and wood dust to minimize their appearance:
And I stopped there to let it dry over night.
While it was doing that, it was time to begin thinking about how to hollow this out and I decided, given my arthritic hands, to use a large diameter Forstner bit drill out the inside. I've done this before and it can do a nice job of hollowing. The downside is that the bit and the surrounding wood will get very hot and this can cause cracking in the wood. So I'll do that a little bit at a time.
The other major step is to begin thinking about how to make the urn so it can be opened at a later date. For that I went to a big box store and got a brass fitting to deal with that and I'll talk about that in my next posting.
Stay tuned,
VW
No comments:
Post a Comment