End Grain Bowl Turning – Video

i can't stop thinking about that end grain bowl [Music] [Laughter] [Music] hi i'm kent and welcome to turn a wood bowl you know a while back i turned an ingrained piece of ditch wood yeah i pick up wood from ditches uh doesn't everybody do that this is what the bull turned out to be and i kind of applied some of the techniques and the aesthetics and the design that i would do for a side green bowl and it sort of worked i mean the grain's kind of interesting on the outside here but look at the inside that's really cool with the end grain because we're looking right across the end grain it's really cool and totally different than a side grain bowl and that got me thinking wait a minute why don't i do something that really showcases that ingrained so that's what i'm going to do today for you guys so check this out we're going to do another ingrain turning but this one's going to be a little bit more dramatic and a little bit more showy and it's going to show off that ingrain and i think it's got some great potential you might want to try this yourself when you get a chance all right let's check it out okay so i've got this log and actually this is a great project to use a log that's like this that's short a lot of times you see a short log like this you think and you can't really do much with it as far as making a big side grain bowl but you can do a project like we're going to do right here and you actually don't even need that much of the log as a matter of fact i'm going to cut this log in half i'm going to cut off one of the sides first just to remove that material and start off with a fresh area and then i'm going to split this log in half what i'm doing here with the chainsaws are i want to make sure i do not touch the ground with my chain that's a surefire way to dull a chainsaw blade really quick so what i did is i cut down as far as i could and then flip the the log over and then do a just a light cut up into finish up that that separation so i'm going to cut down between the two halves of this log and actually the two little blocks that i have there on the ground are helping to prevent me from getting into the ground with the chain so i've flipped the log over i've already got it mostly cut and make sure you have the chin the bar all the way into the the opening first before you start running the saw and just pull it up through the cut it will sever that very quickly without giving you a kickback well the bark is not going to be part of this project and i think i i knew that before and it's pretty obvious now it just fell right off which is fine that's no big deal okay so this is going to be a little interesting because the pith is not in the center of this blank and i'm not going to true this up so in other words i want the natural edge of this log to be the outside of the bowl so i'm not going to be cutting that and making it perfectly round but i do want to find the center of this piece so i'm going to measure that and just divide it by half and i measure it from four angles across and then at about 45 degrees from those that first cross using my force bird bit i'm going to mount this into the lathe with the tail stock and this is basically a traditional end-to-end mounting oops that little bit of bark that i thought i could leave there has got to come off so let me chisel that off okay now it'll rotate so this is a pine i don't know the exact species it's it's a yellow pine for whatever reason it it's very wet but it doesn't have a lot of sap in it which i'm very thankful for because some of the trees with a lot of sap are can be very difficult to turn and honestly i don't know why that might be i don't know if this is because of the section of the tree that this was cut out of and maybe the sap all gathered in a different portion of the tree whatever the case this wood is pretty much just wet it's not sticky which is what you typically find pine now i'm getting a lot of pushback from this because the way i have this mounted at the moment the blank is just a little bit higher in one spot so it really wants to push that bevel i'm trying to apply down pressure on the tool rest so i can make a nice clean pass into the bowl but it's really fighting me so i'll just keep making passes until we eventually get a clean pass across here you'll be able to see the difference in the cut you see how it's vibrating there and pushing me back you want to make sure you continually tighten the tail stock when you're doing this too because of the wet wood the teeth in the four tooth spur and the head stock is gonna dig in and so is the tail stock quill and as they're digging in they need to be tightened up otherwise they may loosen themselves so i'm going to mark where the tendon will go now this is an ingrained turning and remember that we have to use a tenon within grain if i were to do a mortise or a recess and expand the base of this there's a good chance that i'm just going to break grain apart and then the bowl will come apart so we instead we'll use a tenon and the tenon will use a compression force on those end grain fibers and create a very nice strong firm hold on the bulb blank i have an irregular shaped outer edge there you can see where the high spot was coming around it was making the bowl gouge dance around quite a bit now this is my half inch 55 degree bevel swept back bowl gouge that i'm using at the moment this is kind of my personal go-to gouge that i enjoy using you can use any type of bowl gouge you'd like you can you could use a scraping tool as well now a scraper with an end grain turning like this probably would would not yield the best results why you might be asking well think about what we're doing we're cutting across all of the open ends right now see the shavings coming off they're not really shavings they're more like little bits coming off there that's because it's the ends the tips of the straws or the fibers of those end grains we're not cutting any kind of long fibers so it's creating a we really want to cut these these ends if we scrape them there's a chance we're going to tear them and when we tear them we start ripping them and then we get a really awful messy surface that's got tool marks and ruts in it and there's no way to sand that out either the only way that it can be cleaned up is to cut down to the deepest torn in grain fibers and make a good clean cutting pass across those okay now this might be you might have noticed something a little different here i'm working from the rim down to the base well there again this is a supported grain cut for an in-grain turning this is not like most of the bowls i typically turn which are side grain bowls a side grain bowl we typically want to turn from the rim i'm sorry from the base up to the rim with an ingrained bowl we want to work from the rim down to the base of the bowl that's because we have we want longer supported grains under the area that we're cutting now i've got a video all about supported grain cuts and if you haven't seen it and if you're questioning what i'm saying right now you might want to see that video because it helps spell out exactly what i'm talking about and understanding a grain supported cut is critical for making a good quality surface on your wood bowls this wood is in the in the fact that i'm cutting across those end grains is really taking its toll on this bull gouge pretty quickly so i need to go ahead and sharpen it again just bring it back up to the sharpening station and just quickly work both those bevels until both bevels are clean up to the cutting edge it doesn't take long to sharpen but it is critically important that you sharpen your tools every time it needs to happen okay here i'm basically creating the shape of the bottom of the bowl you can see if you watch from the top i'm shaping the profile of the bowl here and as i'm turning i'm aware of the tool against the wood but what i'm doing is i'm looking across the bowl from my point of view i'm looking at the top of the bowl kind of what you're doing right here by looking at the top of the bull and watching the shape as it forms and i'm making sure i'm getting a nice fluid curve that i want for the bottom of this bowl it's funny because this log was relatively short and i cut it in half and in reality it's much more wood than i need to turn this we only really need a small sliver of that initial log to turn this particular bowl there again look at the shavings coming off they're more like flakes coming off that's all of the end grain fibers being cut there are no big curly shavings you can see them all over the lathe too it's more like dust that's the end of the straws or the ends of the end grain being sheared off and you really want to take your time here you see i've got a really nice smooth bevel riding cut going on here that's going to assure that we have got a really nice clean surface and those end grain fibers are being cut and not ripped out look how wet that wood is just making a really nice clean pass across here now remember this type of pass and making a clean smooth advance across the bull surface right there is all done by body movement my hands and my arms are not moving i'm just leaning my weight forward as that gouge progresses across the cut okay so i'm going to use my spindle detail gouge and create an inside dovetail angle on my tenon that way it will match the jaws of the four jaw chuck very well and will have a nice clean connection to the to the chuck the surface of the shoulder is a little bit rough so i'm going to use the bowl gouge and i'm going to clean that up just you make a really light cut just to cut off all the tops of those end grain fibers and so we've got a nice clean shoulder there now i'll go back to the spindle detail gouge and work down into that crease i want to make sure there's nothing no material in there that's going to interfere with the connection to the chuck okay so we have the bottom of the bowl turned i'm going to take the four spur drive out of the headstock and we'll install the four jaw chuck and we'll mount the bowl there you can see how important it is that the shoulder rests right up against the top of the chuck jaws and it does not sit down into the bottom of the chuck i'm going to use the tail stock here to stabilize this and keep it under control while i'm removing material we'll take the tail stock off in a little while you always want to bring that tail stock up if you can for added support and stability while you're turning also i'm going to be making passes 90 degrees to the headstock which is a little bit violent for the tenon and it can create the tenon to become jarred or come loose in the in the four jaw chuck but with the tail stock there everything's pretty much pinned in so you can make a little bit more aggressive cuts with the tail stock supporting the bowl now keep in mind this is not a side grain mounted bowl and i'm a little bit leery i'm trying to stay out of the line of fire or the line the rotation rotating line of this bowl because an outer section of this could easily break away if any of those grains decided they just want to give up and the centrifugal force of the bowl turning contributes they could just come flying off in a big chunk so i i'm trying not to stand directly in front of this bull blank now right there i was making a little bit too aggressive cut i was making a very thick deep cut and i actually slowed the lathe down and caused the belt to skip there all you need to do is back up the bowl gouge a little bit take a little bit thinner cut if you ever get in a position like that to start these cuts and to make sure they stay smooth and straight compared to the remainder of the cut and because if i have that irregular rim i'm applying down pressure into the tool rest i'm not trying to use the bowl as support instead i'm using the tool rest and keeping pressure down into the tool rest so that the gouge stays in a straight line based on the tool rest not the bowl and that's going to assure that you get a nice clean straight cut here again i'm taking a pretty aggressive deep cut there and i'm i slowed down the lace so i'm going to back up and take about half of that and then we'll do that in two passes instead of one deep quick pass you can get a little too aggressive if you're not careful the amount of shavings and the moisture in them are incredible it's just coating everything right now keeping that center mass in the middle of the bowl acts to stabilize the bowl as well this bowl is going to be relatively thick and but we still don't want the outside rim or outside edge of this flexing much while we're turning and that center mass will help stabilize that i'll tell you what i'm gonna go clean my visor because i can barely see at the moment and while i'm doing that if you would please click that like button below the screen because you youtube's algorithm sees your click and it will help send this video out to more people and that helps everything out and i greatly appreciate that so thank you so much okay i can see a little bit better now i'm doing something that's technically not right i am cutting against the supported grain direction here this is the direction that you normally cut when you're doing the inside of a side grain mounted bowl going from the rim down into the interior of the bottom of the bowl however i really need to be working from the center out on an ingrained bowl however because this bowl is almost flat we're really just cutting cutting those top in-grain fibers and they're they're actually supported with plenty of support behind them so at a slight angle like this bowl has i'm okay making a cut going from the rim down to the bottom on an end grain piece if this bowl had any deeper walls then i wouldn't be able to do this i would be tearing out material and i would have really bad ingrained tear out on the sides of the bowl on the inside but in this case since it's almost horizontal and we're pretty much cutting across those end grain fibers we're not seeing much tear out also the moisture content in the wood is really helping to reduce that tear out wood is the best to cut if you want a good clean cut and an easy turning experience because those cells in the wood are just plump with moisture and they cut very very easily and smoothly almost in any direction and quite honestly you could make cuts against the supported grain direction when you have really green wood like this and usually you're going to get pretty decent results still it's not a good habit to get into because you want to learn good grain support direction and turn with the grain supported direction but you can't always do that it's not a major deal if if you're dealing with green wood so i'm just going to work this down now remember we've got the four jaw chuck in the back so i'm not depending on the tail stock here and just a moment i'm going to remove that connection to the tail stock and then we'll get the tail stock out of the way when you're working on creating an even thickness from the rim to the bottom of the bowl one of the biggest takeaways is to make very light passes progress very slowly what we're doing is we're actually sneaking up on that final thickness we don't want to make aggressive cuts when we're down there and we want to make really clean cuts and one great way to do that is to get back to your sharpening station and sharpen that bowl gouge we need a really sharp bowl gouge to make sure that those last few passes are super clean and leave a very nice smooth cut surface and it only takes a couple seconds to get over to the sharpening station and get that bowl gouge sharp again so i'm picking up where the high spot begins and working down into the interior of the bottom of the bowl remember the center of the bowl turns at the slowest rate compared to the rest of the bowl the outer rim is turning much faster than the inside of the bowl so that means you also have to slow down your pace at the center of the bowl don't push across those fibers in the center of the bowl thinking they're going to get cut out smoothly if you continue a fast pace into the bottom center of the bowl you're going to rip out fibers and you're going to have pit marks in there and you really don't want that so slow down your pace when you get to the middle of the bottom of the bowl here i'm just feeling for any any irregularities or any high spots that i want to address before i get down into the very bottom okay now we can take that nub off we absolutely don't need this nub anymore now the tail stock and that number completely in the way so we're gonna go ahead and turn those off get those out of the way and finish up the bottom of this it's kind of neat that the center of the bowl is not where that pith is but we need to make a really clean cut in that center so i don't want there to be any marks so that your eye goes from the pith that's not centered to the true center of the bowl i have my tool rest a little high here or a little low rather i need to bring it up just a bit so my cutting edge is right on center i want a nice clean cut i've got a video all about tool rest and i address the concept of the height of the tool rest and why we position it where we position it so you want to check out that video as well again very light passes here and slow that paste right down to the center so that you cut everything off cleanly i can tell there's a little bit of a flat spot there and i want that bottom interior to be concave and fluid with the total curve of the bowl to make very light cuts here and when it's done well you can't even tell where we were just turning it's a little bit high still i'm going to make a again a very light very very delicate pass here now that bowl gouge is almost completely open as well that was a high spot that i was dealing with there that i wanted to smooth out and look what happens when you have an ingrained piece now this isn't super thin this is a quarter of an inch maybe seven millimeters thick it's not very it's not super thin but the light shines right through those end grain fibers okay so now we need to take the tenon off and shape the base of this bowl because it has so much moisture in it if i were to leave that base thick like it is right now the base would stay wet longer than the rest of the bowl and because there would be an unevenness of moisture content the bowl would certainly crack apart and just be a big mess so we don't want that to happen so what i need to do is i need to shape the bottom of the bowl so that we have the same thickness in the base and in the feet of the bowl so i'm going to slowly work across here and remove the tenon and this cut in the past i'm making right now is i'm mimicking the bottom curve of the bowl as if i were picking up that cut from the outside of that foot area i'm making a pull cut backwards it's a scraping cut only the bottom lower part of the wing of that bowl gouge is engaging and scraping the inside of that foot and then i'm making a push cut again see how that's continuing the curve of the bowl itself the idea is that the bottom of this bowl makes the bowl look like it it just flows right through those feet and is almost like the feet that ring that the is the foot of the bowl was just attached to the to the overall full curve of the bowl and using my bowl gouge i'm going to nibble away the area in the center of the bottom of the bowl and i'll switch over to my spindle detail gouge to finish off that nub make it a little bit narrower i got to be careful here because i only have a few ingrained fibers holding this all together and the tail stock is critical i'm going to push forward and turn the lathe off and the motion of pushing forward severs those grains and that little nub just comes right off now i'm not going to be able to sand this right now because it's so wet and it's all ingrained i'm not going to be able to sand it at this point i'll wait for it to dry completely and then i can come back and sand it and here's how we can test and see if we got the thickness in the bottom of that foot about the same thickness as the rest of the bowl it's actually a little bit thicker you can see how the light isn't quite coming through there as as much as it is on the sides but it's very close to the same thickness how cool is that i love seeing these rings like that and it just hit me as i stopped here between takes i counted those rings and i just realized this log is older than me so that was it was kind of an eye-opener i it's i love seeing nature and i love being able to share something like this this is such a beautiful piece so here it is an ingrained platter bowl i think it's a bladder no we don't want to call it the bladder how about a uh a palole now it it's a bowl it's just a very very shallow bowl it's gonna hold about a couple centimeters of soup not too much but all in all i think it's pretty cool and it really does the trick of showcasing that end grain and that was the ultimate goal of turning this i really wanted to show this piece off and it's kind of cool that that pith the center of the tree is actually off center in the bowl itself just a little bit i like that actually so now what i'm going to do with this is i'm going to put it in a paper bag now you might be thinking why would you put this in a paper bag well if you recall and i'm gonna i'm gonna lightly [Applause] i'm gonna lightly cover the edges of this and i'm gonna tape it together so it's not leaking too much here if you recall while i was turning this this is very wet and when you have a piece of wood that's very wet we want it to be a controlled drying process we don't want it to dry super fast if it dries super fast it's probably going to crack so we're actually going to that drying process and slow it down so by putting it in a bag it's protecting the bull from the elements any kind of air movement any sunlight any excess dryness in the air or moisture in the air it kind of think of the bag as a buffer and that buffering is going to slow the drying process of this bowl now over the course of the next day the moisture content of this bowl is probably going to saturate this bag and it's going to make it wet when it does that i'm going to take it out of this bag and i'm going to put it into a new fresh dry dry bag until the moisture content has come down quite a bit with the bowl now this is a whole other topic in and of itself and it really it really needs its whole its own video but actually i have a whole e-course an online e-course i'm working on treatable and i deal with drying and all of that and explain that but what i wanted makes clear to you guys is just by putting it in the into a bag is not a magic trick and sometimes it won't even solve any problems now the reason i'm doing this is because this bowl is really wet if you have wood that is semi-wet maybe it's almost dry and you turn it there might not be any need for you to put it in a bag and it also depends on your environment and your climate how humid it is how hot it is now if you're in an incredibly dry place you may need to soak this in water you need main on the lathe you may need to spray this with water to keep it moist and keep it from drying out and then once it is finished being turned you may have to wrap it and keep that moisture in the wood for as long as possible because nature's doing everything it can to extract that moisture immediately i don't have that situation in my particular environment and if you do have that all also if you have a relatively dry environment say in the winter time you could take the wet shavings from the turning that you just did pick those up off the floor and stuff those all around the bowl inside the bag and that adds as additional insulation or buffering to keeps that moisture in the bowl and just lets it slowly release so it's kind of a think of the bag as a shield from the environment and the bowl so it's it's insulating the bowl so to speak so there's a lot more to drying wood and i've got a course that's going to be coming out all about green wood and turning trees into bowls and you're going to want to check that out but for the most part just remember the the paper bag technique may or may not work for you based on the moisture in the bowl that you turn and your particular environment so keep that in mind thank you so much for watching and if this video has helped you learn new techniques or has shown you some new ways of doing some turning or possibly what the bag drying method is that we just discussed then do me a favor leave me a comment below i always love reading comments i try to respond to as many as possible and i love getting feedback from you guys and i greatly appreciate that do me a huge favor and click that like button below the screen if you haven't already and if you haven't subscribe to my channel click that bell as well so when the next video comes out you'll be notified and you won't miss anything we've got lots more videos coming your way you're going to want to check them out all right guys thank you so much for watching and until next time happy turning you

Channel: Turn A Wood Bowl

Views: 24,891

Rating: 4.9759903 out of 5

Keywords: End Grain Bowl Turning – Video, end-grain turning, end-grain bowl, woodturning, natural edge bowl, wood grain, end grain bowl, Kent Weakley, Turn a wood bowl, wood bowl, wood turning, end grain, bowl turning, woodturning bowl, log to bowl, wood turning bowl, wooden bowl, live edge bowl, woodturning log, how to make, bowl turning videos, woodturning bowl blanks, woodturning bowl shapes, woodturning bowl gouge, tree rings, Ring bowl

Id: o3nK9CQOXg4

Length: 31min 35sec (1895 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 24 2021