The Wedding Present-Completion Photos

 Hello All,

The bowl is finished and I'm happy with the way it turned out. It required quite a bit of finessing and that really helped. That and some patience to let the finish work it's magic. 

Here's the completion photos:

I think our niece and her fiance will like the bowl and find it very useful over what I hope is a long, happy marriage. Congrats to Sarah and Joseph!

Ok, this is the last project for the year. I hope all of you have a wonderful holiday season and a terrific New Year. 

See you next Spring!

VW

The Wedding Present project-Sanded and First Layer of Finish

 Hello All,

Well I got up early today and took the bowl off the lathe and sat down and hand sanded it and I managed to fix most of the problems on the bowl. About mid morning I stopped and went out and ran an errand and when I came back, I put the bowl back on the lathe and did a full 100 to 400 grit sanding. It leveled out the surfaces and eliminated all of the deep scratching and minimized the pitting. I followed up with some hand sanding to a couple of rough spots and smoothed them. Then I cleaned the surface with compressed air and gave it it's first layer of salad bowl finish. Here's the photos:

As it's too cold for this to dry in the shop, I'm going to wait a couple of hours and then bring it inside. It should be dry enough to pick it up by then. 

The first layer will dry and raise the grain a little bit but I'll sand that smooth tomorrow. Then I'll give it several more coats and those will be the finish coats.

I'll post completion photos this weekend.

VW

The Wedding Present-Whew!

 Hi Everyone,

Well, I managed to smooth out some of the ridges in the bowl. Here's the photos:

When last we met, the inside walls of the bowl had a lot of ridges and scratching that I didn't think I could remove by using my turning chisels and I didn't want to spend a lot of time trying to hand sand that flat. Scratching like this can be really difficult to totally remove so I was at my wits end:

So I talked it over with my son Critter the Welder, and he suggested an angle grinder with some sanding disks. I went out and purchased one:

I connected it to the air compressor and sanded away. The sanding disc that came with the grinder is very coarse-maybe 80 grit and it started to really chew up the wood, so it took it off and replaced it with a wider disk that is about 120 grit. It smoothed off the ridges and helped with the scratching. It also smoothed a few high spots in the bottom of the bowl so I think with a proper diameter, finer sanding disk I can probably remove the scratching. You can still see some of this in the photo below:

It's freezing cold this afternoon so I took the bowl off the lathe and brought it outside for some photos:

And I took it inside to compare it with my fruit platter of recent memory:

Overall I'm pleased with the project and plan to finish it. The bowl is a nice size and will hold a lot of fruit.

Ok, I'm going to get some smaller, finer disks for the grinder tomorrow and give this another shot.

Stay tuned,

VW