A Bowlful of Cedar

hi I'm Rick and Rick turns and today's video is hello I'm Rick Morris today I'm gonna be turning a bowl out of this really really nice cedar log this is a big cedar log and it's still fairly fresh kind of about a little over 16 inches in length on this and let's see maximum dining on the front close to 14 inches I'm going to cut it lengthwise down here to begin with and then consider maybe cutting it down even more to get several smaller bowls instead of two large bowls we'll see how that turns out well I'll tell you one of the advantages of an electric chainsaw you can use them inside the workshop without choking yourself on fumes so like I said I'm gonna make a straight cut right down here there's sort of a crease in the tree trunk here which I'm going to go just to the left off so here to here yeah [Applause] [Music] [Applause] man look at that wood is that incredible beautiful cedar is beautiful wood I want to keep this in the bowl something to mark off about 13 inches right there and then I could cut right down there all right I'm just gonna take that down so this is gonna be my bowl blank right here I'm gonna cut that round on the bandsaw but before I go to the bandsaw and one other thing I want to do and let's check the moisture content with my moisture meter this is a fairly inexpensive moisture meter so I don't expect a lot from it but it does help anyway a dry piece of wood that's been sitting right beside the moisture meter in my workshop I get two point ten point four percent moisture content so on this log that may or may not be six or eight months old I'm gonna check it here we got fourteen point seven percent right in the center 14.3% out near the edge so it's not really not really as dry as I would like and I'm not sure if I'm gonna need to dry it out in my drying box after I rough turn it let's see how it goes I need to find largest circle I can get out of this and that's see I've got a bunch of templates that I use so this is an 11 inch template right here put that on there it's a little bit too large but actually I think that's okay if I go one inch smaller like that yeah that would probably be better so they go ten inches I've got to put it on the top here unfortunately so that it'll be stable when I put it on the bandsaw so now I've got a guess where the correct center is here I've got to screw in a couple of washers it's going to fasten this down and this of course is temporary and that is nice and tight so this goes to the bandsaw [Applause] phonce the bandsaw can't remove this temporary screw here this is gonna be the bottom of the bow and I've got to mount it initially on the lathe on my chuck with a wormhole screw get this way get that way I'm going to be using my one-way straw old chuck here woodworm screw and my cedar blank cedar is not very strong they're gonna be really careful turning this could put too much pressure on it last bowl I had made out of cedar which was probably fifteen years ago I was making one final cut on it just to trim up one of the little part the whole thing blew apart it's definitely the most spectacular blow up I've ever had alright I think that's ready to go it's me again I haven't mentioned it earlier but cedar dust is considered toxic not necessarily fatal but bad to breathe so I'm going to be wearing my air shield Pro and that's going to add a little more noise to the video but I'll turn it down on the editor I'm almost up at 700 I made some progress here but I need to bring it down I think beyond this particular point right here Cedar's not real strong I need a lot of wood for that Chuck to grip either with a spigot or a recess and I'm going to use a recess I always do [Applause] that looks pretty good so I'm going to go ahead and mark that as you can see I've made this fairly deep close to a half inch deep once again the reason is the waters weak all right as you can see I've got it reversed it's now mounted in the recess that I turned in it [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] okay I've had about maximum depth there that's good that's about a half an inch of wood left in the bottom so as I've said before not real strong wood I'm not going to cut it real thin don't really want to make that any narrower thinner it's sitting at about a half an inch down here quite a bit more [Music] [Laughter] [Applause] all right that's as far as I'm gonna go one of these knots is starting to split out yeah it's actually moving there so I'm gonna put some glue on that a couple other places let that set up and then I'm going to do the sanding so I'll be back after the sanding all right all the sanding is done inside and out and now I'm going to put on a coat of boiled linseed oil and then after that soaks in and dries out I'll be coming back and putting on a another coat of a mixture made of varnish boiled linseed oil and paint thinner suggested to me by one of the folks didn't look at one of my other videos so this is the first coat of boiling seed oil and I'm just gonna watch this on don't need to have the lathe running at all [Music] and that cedar really looks great yes indeed when I get the final finish on there that's gonna that's gonna look really good I think all right finishing up right down here I'm just going to cut that in just a little bit very lightly as you can see I've got my gigantic face bait here with the bowl pressed up against it like this and I'm going to turn it real slow [Music] [Applause] yes see the boat turned out okay does have some cracks in it cedar is not a strong wood as I had mentioned but overall it's shall we say functional I don't think got sort of soup in it but anyway cedar is a pretty wood see you next video [Music]

Channel: RickTurns

Views: 2,897,463

Rating: 4.4010267 out of 5

Keywords: woodturning, woodturned, bowl, bowl-turning, cedar

Id: lYuK06wQxU4

Length: 14min 45sec (885 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 01 2018