Log to Bowl — Woodturning Video

it's time to turn a log into a bowl [Music] from Canton welcome to turn a wood bowl today I'm going to show you the whole process of taking wood from a log and turning it into a bowl now I have a freshly cut log that was just cut a couple days ago so it's very green or wet and this is the perfect type of wood to use when turning a Live Edge bowl and that's exactly what we're going to be doing today so let's head out and I'm going to show you how I process wood to get it ready for turning on the lathe okay so what I'm cutting up today is Oak and this is a white oak not super certain what the species is I believe it might be a Laurel Oak the thing with White Oaks is they can cross breed so they can have different combinations of White Oaks and there are actually hundreds of them possibly so it's not quite certain but I have turned some stuff in the past that was also identified to me as Laurel Oak and it was actually pretty nice first thing I do when I'm cutting along like this is I cut off a section of the end so I can see the grain really well I Mark the pith now I'm looking for even distances on either side of that pith and I'm going to cut the entire pith out I made this Mark initially and I'm looking at this large section I'm actually looking at the section right there that's the section I want to use but now I'm looking at it I can see that I actually need to change the angle just a little bit to get the ideal cut there so that's going to be what I'm going to cut so I'm going to make two cuts I'll have two large bowl blanks and a slab in the middle the slab in the middle which will be on either side of the pit will be quarter-sawn wood if you want to learn more about quartersawn wood check out this video now this is a little bit tricky because this log is very heavy and a little bit difficult to push and roll over ideally I would want to roll it over so my saw doesn't have a chance of touching the ground if you if you saw there I was being very cautious and not letting the chain touch the ground if the chain touches the ground the section that touches is immediately dull and inevitably the chain will not Dull evenly so you'll have a section that's cutting in a section that's dull and what will happen is the saw will start pulling to one side so if you see that you're making cuts and the bar of your chainsaw is kind of taking its own path and curving in One Direction or the other it's most likely because you have dulled you have dull teeth on one side or the other and so what I'm doing is I'm cutting down both of these paths at one time it's about 90 percent of the distance and then I'll flip the log over this makes it a lot easier to manage if I cut off one side completely then the log becomes unbalanced and you have to you have to basically deal with it a little bit differently so what's neat here is I love doing that cut it's kind of like I'm unzipping that piece you just go through and it's a back cut you want to make sure the blade is actually in there quite a way so it doesn't kick back which basically just make the the final portion of that cut and then you have your two halves for bull blanks and the quarter-sawn section in the middle okay so back in the shop I'm going to put this on the bandsaw and I'm going to round it I'm using one of my discs that I made these are obviously just made with cardboard and this will give me the pattern to trim the circle out or the cylinder from this bulb link I like to center it up so that it's on the top Ridge of that so there's about an even amount of wood material on both sides of that piece and then I'll Bring It Around the bandsaw and cut it out round you want to let your saw take its time and make the cut especially in that thick spot right there you don't want to force it through too quickly make sure that you're not bogging down your motor okay and with that piece cut out I'm going to pull off the scrap material and bring this over to the lathe now this piece is rather heavy because this is green wood and it's going to be a little bit of a trouble trying to balance it between two points I am going to mount this to the lathe using my four spur Drive Center which is just a friction fit in the M2 port for the headstock so the little hole that's in the middle of the headstock is a Morris taper 2 and the drive Center will just fit in there what I'm going to do is I'm going to clear away some of this bark and then I'm going to drill out a cylinder that I've centered right in the center of this log where the four spur Drive Center will connect this will give me the ability to keep the log in place so it doesn't slide off completely while I'm trying to position it in the lathe I'm using a forstner bit and you can see I'm down maybe a half inch about I mean 10 15 millimeters and that's going to make it easier for that to stay connected to the drive Center then I'll bring the tail stock up now you might be wondering why in the world would you mount this between centers now if you're just starting off this might be a little bit tricky to do and you may have some frustration doing it if you're just starting off with a blank this size I highly recommend using a face plate and if you use a face plate then you're going to need to take a little more time and clear off a lot more bark on the top and you're going to need to make a flat surface there for the face plate and that's going to give you a really good stable connection the reason I like turning between centers is this right here this gives me the I the ability to loosen the tail stock and line up the wings of the bowl what I don't want is I don't want to have a Live Edge bowl that when it's sitting on the table one of the Wings is higher than the other I can do it if I wanted to and exaggerate it perhaps but when one is just a little bit higher than the other it looks off and it's not quite right so with the tail stock and this end-to-end connection I can simply loosen the tail stock and move the end of the bowl blank to where I need it to be and we're going to do that again in just a second I'll show you why now I'm using my 5 8 inch 55 degree bevel swept back Bowl gouge I know you guys love hearing me say that this is my personal preference for the profile on the voltage it's not the only way or the only Bowl gouge out there obviously if you have a different bevel angle that you like to use that's perfectly fine I just feel very comfortable with this particular cut and with this particular angle the bevel angle it works very well for me so I'm going to round out the bottom portion of this bowl so that I can see where the lower portion of the bowl will line up the the lower sides of the bowl and I'll show you that a little bit closer here in a second I'm just making a push cut going from the base up to the rim which is a supported grain cut if you're not familiar with supported grain Cuts you're really going to want to check out this video it's a little tricky because the bottom of this bowl is uneven you can see there because of the timing of the video and the way the light is affecting it you can actually see the voids a little bit it's harder to see in person because it's turning pretty quickly that's another thing that keep in mind is you don't want to turn this faster than is safe so the way you determine your speed for a blank especially a heavy blank like this is to Simply slowly turn up the speed of your lathe until you start feeling a little bit of vibration and then back it off now if your lathe has naturally has a lot of it vibration in it you may be able to get past that that initial vibration turn it a little bit faster than sometimes it'll get into a Groove where it's turning smooth that way but in general as soon as you're feeling vibration on your lathe you want to back the speed down by making the cut around the curve or the bottom of the bowl it's accomplishing three things number one we're shaping the bowl and starting to get a sense of the overall look of this bowl we're reducing the material on the sides of the bowl and we're reducing the base of the bowl so we don't really need to go in and clean up the base as much and we don't have to go down the sides and clean up the sides as much so it's kind of a catch-all it's doing everything we need all in one shot by developing this curve I guess there's actually four points because what it's doing now it's revealing the lower portions of the Live Edge and we've got a little void there looks like a wormhole it is it is tarnished black which indicates that the tannins in the oak are affecting us somehow I don't know if there was metal in there perhaps by the way if you're turning Oak especially green oak or wet Oak it is filled with tannin and it will Rust any regular Steel the high speed steel tools don't rust and the ways on my lathe are also stainless steel which is nice but if you have a regular steel rails or ways on your lathe they will rust from this so you want to get the shavings off quickly you don't leave those laying around because they will Rust up steel very quickly okay so here is the other portion now I'm measuring where the lower part of the Bowl will be and you can see that that section is lower than the other side so let's go around again there you can see how high it was there's there's the section the lowest section there's the high section and there's the low section so I need to make an adjustment to that so what I'm going to do is I'm going to loosen the tail stock and just move that the low section up just a hair you almost didn't see that did you let's try it again and take a look at it okay there's one section and there's the other section they're lined up now and that's the difference that I only moved it maybe 3 8 of an inch or maybe eight millimeters it's not a big move but it's going to balance the bowl out dramatically if you notice I had the two Wings horizontal on the lathe so when I made that adjustment it did not also adjust where the ones were positioned the wings are still parallel to one another but now we have the lower saddle of the Live Edge Rim also balanced so this will be a really nice balanced Bowl when it's all done hopefully and that's that's how you really want to take your time and that's again that's the reason why I use the end to end connection so that I can make that minor adjustment if I were mounted to a face plate the screws are not going to allow me to make a little adjustment like that on a face plate so I'm going to smooth off the base of the bowl and get ready to shape the Tenon and the shoulder I've switched to my half inch 55 degree bevel swept back Bowl gouge and in case you haven't picked up on it yeah I only use the 55 degree bevel swept back Bowl gouge and most of the Bulls I turn are turned with only two well three gouges I have my half inch and my 5 8 inch 55 degree bevel swept back Bowl gouges and I have a detailed spindle gouge and that's it so I'm going to mark my Tenon and I'll keep removing material to shape the cylinder for the Tenon you do not need a whole bunch of tools to turn a bowl as a matter of fact if your intentions are just to turn bowls I highly recommend not purchasing a large set of wood turning tools you you won't be needing them you simply could do you can do what I'm doing here with three tools the other benefit of that too is if you're just using those three tools you will Master them very quickly versus having a whole bunch of different tools and trying to work between them and figure out which one does what and how to use it properly it's a lot easier to learn two tools the bowl gouge and the spindle detail gouge now if you have questions about any of this stuff I hope you realize I have courses on all of this I have woodturning course on my website I have a tree to bowl course which teaches exactly what we're doing here taking a raw log and turning it into a bowl and I have a Tool Sharpening course if you're just getting started I highly recommend starting with the Tool Sharpening course why well if you don't have Sharp Tools you're going to have a frustrating experience all over all around so it's best to learn how to sharpen your tools first so check out my courses on my website turnerwoodbowl.com and you will quickly grow your skills all right what I'm doing here is I'm showing you guys the profile of this I've established the Tenon and the shoulder the shoulder will most likely become the foot of this bowl and that gives me a starting point that's my a point so I'm going to go from A to B and the B is the top of the rim of the wings of this bowl so you can see how I'm shaping this I started with a push cut and now I'm using a Shear scrape the scraping cut and a Shear scrape now the difference between a sheer shear and a scraping cut is scraping cut it the tool is more horizontal and the whole effect is a little more violent it's used primarily for roughing out and removing material quickly where the shear scrape the handle of the tool is dropped at about a 45 degree angle I'm using a push cut right now when you drop the handle on a Shear scrape you're basically turning the edge into a razor and you're just shaving and it's actually a really really great way to fine tune your bowls okay so I'm going to start at the top now and work down and the reason I'm doing this is so that I don't damage the bark up at the top now this technically is not a supported grain cut so I I want to take it easy here and don't get I don't want to get too aggressive because I potentially could rip out in Grain fibers again check out that video on supported grain cut that's looking pretty good I've got a high spot there I need to take away a little more material so by going from left to right in this one section I'm putting pressure down on the bark into the wood if I were to go the other way I would be pulling or potentially pushing the bark off the wood or off the log and it would cause the bark to fall off and we wouldn't want that I'm doing a very light push cut there I've got a little bit of a high Edge now I'm putting a lot of pressure down on my left hand that you see here in the frame I do not want this tool to bounce around because I needed to Simply Glide across that curve that I'm creating and I'm going to let that cut feather out that's looking really good okay so you see what I got here I've got a two angles and I've got a high spot here and I have two high spots one low and one kind of high so I'm going to address those with the shear scrape the bottom is a little rough right now too which is fine what I don't want to do here is I don't want to come in with a push cut if I were to use a push cut and I'm gonna I'm gonna do a small push cut to take this High Rim off because it's a little thicker there but what I don't want to do is I don't want to do a whole bunch of push Cuts because what will happen is I will just keep whittling this bowl down to next to nothing so I as I say that I'm obviously doing a push cut but what I'm doing is I'm I'm refining the shape here I'm looking primarily I'm looking at the bottom of the bowl right now obviously that that bump at the top needs to be dealt with but at the bottom of the bowl I'm trying to get the the shape and the curve just right okay so using my 5 8 inch Bowl gouge I'm going to start doing a really light sheer scrape and I'm going to start taking down those high spots I'm using the bottom wing of the gouge only and you can see the angle I've dropped the handle of this and that's causing the gouge to Simply shave the surface and I'm gliding the tool across the Surface by shifting my body weight my hands and arms are locked in position and I'm just shifting to shave that surface and to put the nice curve on there now I got to take that high spot out and the connecting spot again I'm going to use the lower wing for the sheer scrape and just gently shave back and forth now you can go back and forth I'm going against the supported grain here but because it's making such a light shave it's not going to tear out the end grain fibers that's another huge advantage of the shear scrape so just take your time and shave that whole surface down now as I'm doing this I'm not looking at the tools so much I'm holding it steady in the curve and I'm looking at the top edge of the bowl right here I'm showing you the view that I'm looking at it's very subtle but there's some high spots there that you can see right there and those are what I'm taking down and that's what I'm working on so I'm watching that top Edge as I'm doing the sheer scrape over here and slowly but surely that high Edge will come down okay so now with the exterior of the bowl shaped I'm going to final shape the Tenon the reason why I wait to the very end here is that in case the bull blank shifted even of a hair while I was doing the last few cuts on the exterior of the bowl the exterior of the bowl right now is turning true so I really want the Tenon to match that and that's why I turn the Tenon angle the dovetail angle at the very end right now that way when I turn this around I put it in the four jaw Chuck it should be turning very true all right so we'll take that off the lathe we're done with the tail stock for the moment and the drive center now I'm going to put the four jaw Chuck in now I can't express this enough that Tenon must seat on the top of the Jaws perfectly flush there should be no gap on the top and the Tenon should not bottom out inside the chuck if you see it sitting about just past the halfway point that's how you want that Tenon to be positioned the other thing I just Illustrated there was every time you move your banjo in a tool rest you really want to hand turn the bowl and make sure that it's not bumping the banjo over the tool rust especially when you have a Live Edge bowl like this and especially once the walls get really thin you don't want to slam that bark up against your banjo or your tool rest when you turn the lathe on because it could easily remove bark so this is a tree that we had to cut down in our yard I was really not happy about doing it I hate taking down living trees but it needed to come out because we've got a building project in the works so it's nice to be able to turn some pieces from it and it's nice to get it nice and green like this but Oak a lot of people shy away from Oak Oak is not the most ideal wood to turn for a variety of different reasons but one of the things that I find out about Oak is that it just dried so unusual it takes seems like some some of the pieces can take forever to dry this is kind of neat because the the timing with the camera and the light and the lathe speed makes it look like the Bulls going backwards of course that's not what I'm seeing with my eye the important thing to see here is that I'm making the bevel of the bowl gouge parallel to the exterior of the bowl I'm just mirroring the outside of the bowl when the inside and I'm looking down on the tool as it's doing them it's a good idea to stop often and check and make sure you're getting the wall thickness that you want but anyway back to the this tree in the wood I've had on and off luck with turning Oak especially White Oak I have turned some red oak and actually found that the red Oak's really brittle and I know I don't know if it's because it lacks the medullary Rays the medullary rays are grain fibers that grow from the center of the the pith of the log out to the bark and it creates almost like a lattice or like a web that holds all the annual rings together there's people that love to carve White Oak and it can be carved really thin because of those medullary Rays they will actually hold the annual Rays together so if you take a really thin piece of of white oak and dry it it will usually hold together very nicely because of all the different medullary rays but those medullary rays are going to work against us too when when this bowl dries they're going to pull those annual rings in a 90 degree angle and what will happen is this Oak surface will actually get ripply or bumpy as it dries because of those medullary Rays so it's just something you need to be aware of it was bizarre is you can turn it perfectly smooth off the lathe and then as it dries it starts getting rough and it it seems as if you you didn't turn it straight but that's just the nature of the live or the the white oak I keep wanting to say Live Oak because we have a lot of Live Oak here too but this is not live oak this is this is a white oak and the Live Oak is in the white white oak family but again I believe this is a Laurel Oak yeah and as far as the bark staying on the White Oaks are a little bit tricky because I would say they're probably third in the list number one in in my area is Hickory Hickory bark loves to stay on the wood it thinks it's part of the tree well obviously it's part of the tree but it thinks it's actually part of the wood and it's there's almost no division between the bark and the wood I had another video just recently where I actually picked up a Live Edge bowl by the bark which there's all kinds of species that if you take the time to delicately turn a Live Edge Bowl you would never think about picking up the bowl with the bark just holding onto the bark but with Hickory you can do that with no problem and the bowl that I did it with it was actually pretty heavy the next that's really good in our area is black cherry and that that's hit or miss with the bark the bark can get really brittle with that but Oak is probably the most temperamental the oak does not like staying on too much this wood is very green so the the bark will probably stay on for quite some time but as it dries and contracts it may or may not change and potentially contract enough that it pops off if it does pop off it's not a huge deal we can actually just sand the the rim of the bowl pull all the bark off and it's still a beautiful natural Edge Bowl this is actually a really big topic that comes up with new Turners is how long this is a question I get pretty frequently is how long do I have to wait before the wood's dry enough to turn and I think that question comes from our background as Woodworkers as a woodworker we typically don't ever want to work with wet wood because we know it's going to change shape and it's not what we want especially if we're making something as dimensional so as a woodworker we're always looking for dry wood that once we cut it to an exact size and we attach it to some other piece of wood we don't want it to move at all with wood turning and especially doing large bowls like this it's exactly the opposite you really want to find green wood like this to turn and you want to turn it wet now this bowl will change shape as it dries but typically the size will contract in just a bit and it's almost not noticeable the sides will contract in the foot will change shape a little bit that's what you'll notice the most there's that void it's becoming really visible there it does look like a wormhole but there's a black color to it and that's usually the reaction to tannins so I don't know if there was something in there that caused a reaction typically metal turns to black like that but anyway you don't want to be turning a dry piece of wood if you could find number one if you could find a blank that's as big as the piece I'm turning right now that's completely dry I it would be a miracle that it's not filled with cracks because it's such a huge piece of wood to dry secondly it would be really hard to to turn because the wood is that increases its density or hardness as it dries you're going to be resharpening your tools constantly that's the other great thing about turning wet wood is you don't have to sharpen as much now I'm not showing you all my sharpenings in this video but I probably sharpen my tools maybe five times in the total course of this video and I'm going to sharpen here in a second because when I get down to these Final Cuts especially in the bottom of the bowl I really want to make sure that I sharpened my tool so I get a really nice finish cut I want to do as little sanding as possible so the question of how long do I have to wait for the wood to dry is you don't you really want to turn wet wood especially with a large piece like this now that being said of course you can turn dry pieces as well and you can buy bulb blanks that are completely dry or Kiln drying them if you want to learn more about this I highly recommend checking out my course treatable understanding green wood we have mini lessons in there each with a video that go into great detail explaining everything you need to know for turning raw wood into bowls like we're doing here foreign all that being said about Oak and being temperamental it's I I don't know what it is but there's kind of like a stigma about it and people kind of avoid it for woodturning but I find it's it's actually really beautiful the other thing is once it is dried it's going to be super super durable now what I was mentioning is the sides will pull in and the foot at the bottom of the bulb will also pull in a bit so it's going to be a little unbalanced now I'm going to go sharpen my tool here because these are the Final Cuts I'm making in the inside bottom of the pole if you need to learn more about sharpening your tools sharpening all of your wood turning tools for turning bowls you really need to check out my my Tool Sharpening course online and you can sign up for that and start right now again that course is filled with videos all the steps everything you need to know about sharpening your tools everything you need to know about what Tool Sharpening for Bowl turning is and what it isn't those are actually really important to know as well so check that out so back at the bowl I'm going to be doing some really light Cuts now I have the tool almost completely open that means the flute is pointed straight up this is relatively dangerous you would never do this if you're rough cutting because you're getting some nasty catches but I already have a relatively smooth surface there and I'm just shaving away it just a little bit to make the final passes for this bowl so back to what I was mentioning the the foot of the bulb will also pull up so it'll become a little bit wonky and you'll notice after this dries that when you set it on a table it's going to wobble a little bit but you can easily put that up to you put the foot of the bowl up to a sanding disc and make it flat again so that it seats flat that's part of the reason also why I make my the feet on my bowl a little bit higher so they have some height so they can be adjusted later once the bolt dries but because this shape is so organic the live of the Live Edge bowl with this this unusual oval shape that the bowl Contracting a little bit as it dries is almost not noticeable so you don't have to worry too much about it it's not as if you're making a nice round perfectly round salad bowl if you make a perfectly round salad bowl with green wood then yes you're going to see the top rim of that turned to an oval and it's going to look a little bit weird but that's what twice turning is all about and again I cover that in the treatable understanding Greenwood course okay so the bowl is turned I have not sanded it I haven't sanded it because it is sopping wet what I'm going to do is I'm going to take a little bit of Danish oil this is tried and true Danish oil which is pure linseed oil boiled linseed oil and I'm going to apply it to the end grain and the reason I'm doing that is I'm applying it to the end grain primarily I'm not trying to put a finished coat on here I'm applying it to the end grain so that it plugs up those fibers a little bit and slows down the drying process in the end grain so what's happening now on the high spots of this bowl the end grains is the moisture is just going to Leach out very quickly because we have all these cut open pores almost like the ends of straws on the sides of the bowl it's kind of like the sides of straws the moisture is going to stay in there naturally a lot easier so I'm going to coat the end grain to slow down that drying process and hopefully have a little bit more even drying process now I'm going to let this dry overnight and that's going to get the surface area dry and much drier and it'll make it a lot easier to sand tomorrow foreign so after an evening of drying you can see the oil just disappeared it soaked it all up you can actually see that the surface is different you can hear it's feel it sounds drier the walls are thin but they're not super thin so this is going to hold moisture for quite some time I'm just going to work around now inevitably when you turn a Live Edge Bowl you're going to have tool marks especially up on the wings so take your time and work with the grain of the wood now this is different than the supported grain cuts when you're cutting in the direction of the bowl gouge I'm actually using the side of the sanding pad and I'm sanding the grain to make it all smooth and to take out any tool marks and I'm starting at 80 because this is this is a coarse heavy wood that really needs to be sanded down smooth first if you get all the tool marks out first each of your Progressive sanding grits will be that much easier I've got a video All About sanding bowls you might want to check that out now I will use the side of the sander not up to the wings but out on the wings just a little bit and not to the center of the bowl this is really really important if you have the lathe rotating and you sand across the center of the bowl you're going to sand the area right before the center point and then you're going to re-sand that area just on the other side of it in other words it's impossible to take the sanding pad right up to the center middle of the bottom of the bowl without going through and when you do that you're going to make this little Valley around the center because you're sanding if you think about it you're sanding the area on both sides of the center Twice first when you approach the center and then again when you go over the center so that area is going to get sanded more and you're going to make this little ring in the bottom of the bowl so you want to turn off the lathe and sand the middle of the bowl by hand and I typically flip the bowl around and sand it from both sides so I don't make a rut from one way or the other now I'll go through the exterior the bowl and I'll do the same thing I'm going to sand all of those tool marks anything that looks a little off I'm going to sand that out and then I'm going to work through all my grids I'm going to go from 80 to 120 to 180 to 220 to 320. and then I'm going to have this beautiful Bowl that's nice and smooth now the inside of the wood is still relatively wet but the moisture is not coming out to the surface now so we just have to wait for this piece to dry which again Oak takes a long time to dry so we'll give that we'll give that a few months and then we'll take a look at it and see how it goes but it will be done right now and just by waiting overnight the surface is perfectly capable of taking a sanding and being finished even though the interior of the wood is still holding moisture okay so I'm going to use my half inch Bowl gouge to shape the foot of the bowl I want to put a little angle on here I don't want that to be straight up and down just an aesthetic thing and I'll start taking the Tenon down we'll just reduce the Tenon down to the base of the foot foreign and then before I get too far down I really need to deal with that transition at the the connection between the foot and the bowl there's it's not quite as clean as I would like so I'm going to use my spindle detail gouge I'm going to make a crisp Corner down at the bottom of the foot and the where it connects to the Bowl I'm just going to lightly shave that area doing a kind of a side scraping coat with a spindle gouge here remember you don't want to do anything aggressive with the spindle gouge on a bowl blank because of the side grain mounted Orient orientation okay so now I'm going to do a Shear scrape I gotta merge that that area that we just worked into the previous Bowl section I'm going to do a Shear scrape to take that down and blend it into the side of the bowl the other great thing of using the end to end connection like I did initially was I have that point from the tail stock marked in the bottom of the bowl so I can easily re-center it like I just did and it's turning relatively true okay so I've transitioned that area and I'm going to take a little bit of time and sand that so that it matches the bottom of the bowl so now we have the bottom of the bowl in the exterior of the foot all squared away we just need to shape the inside of the foot now I never need leave the bottom foot of the bowl solid like you're seeing it right now that's what I need to shape next couple reasons for that number one is it's it's aesthetically it's boring it's just to have a fat a flat bottom on the bowl so what I'll do is I'll make a nice level Rim there and then you see me change the angle I'll start scooping out some of that interior if we leave that flat across the bottom not only is it going to be boring but as the bowl shifts and contracts a little bit as it dries it's also never going to be flat again so it's going to wobble a lot if it's on a flat surface by having a ring for feet for a foot on the bottom of the bowl I'm able to just simply sand a little bit of that foot and level it out later on I'm using a backwards cut here and I'm going really light and I don't want to get too aggressive with this and I have the flute really open so this is very very delicate work here if you notice I'm making very light Cuts I don't don't want to get too aggressive a catch here could be really bad also at this point you do not want to tighten your tail stock that little bit of material will compress and it'll change the whole connection so you just want to leave it where it was ideally you tighten it up before you start all of this and snug it up really nice so what I really want is I want the inside bottom of the foot to match the curve of the exterior of the bowl it's that simple so I'm going to come in with my spindle detail gouge and work away this little nub just take your time taking away a little bit of material the other thing is the oak has relatively large grains so sometimes it's a little difficult getting a cut started because the size of the grains or the fibers now right here you could stop and cut that off and then sand it if you want I like to to cut it off using the spindle detail gouge I'll apply forward pressure and then turn the lathe off and then plant extra pressure right then and it will it'll Shear that no completely off now the little portion at the bottom will simply sand that again I'm using the side edge of the sanding disc and I'll flip that around so that I don't make a rut one way or the other I want the bottom to be relatively smooth so there's the bowl now we have to apply some finish now like I said this is going to take a long time to dry and it's very porous meaning it's going to soak up finishes so for this one I use the tried and true Danish oil which is pure boiled linseed oil and nothing else and the reason I'm going to use this is because it allows me to put a nice thin coat on and allow it to be soaked into the surface of the wood this this bowl right now is going to soak this up so quickly that by this time tomorrow this bowl is going to look almost like it did before I put any oil on it because it's just going to absorb it and it also allows me to apply it to the grains of the bark the bark has the ability to absorb the oil as well and the more I can do to preserve the bark the better chance I have that bark staying on the bowl so I'll work that in the edges what I don't want to do is I don't want to work a lot into the top of the bark because if it if it gunks up there or if you have a thick area of the oil it will turn gummy and we don't want that so this oil gets applied very thin essentially the manufacturer's instructions are if you see the surface changed or look like it has oil on it you have enough on it so you do not have to apply a lot as a matter of fact I put the applicator in there I squeegee off most of the excess and then simply rub it on and then after about 10 minutes you with a clean cloth you wipe off the entire Bowl so that takes off any thicker areas or any excess areas you just want a very thin coat look at those medullary Rays you can see them there they're the ones running up to the bark those go to from the center of the tree out to the park the medullary rays are believed to store sugars and different components for the tree kind of like a storage capacity for the tree or for the wood inside the tree it's just gorgeous pulling out all the green let me look at all that so you see those little Dash marks like kind of in the center that's the medullary rays but as the you're looking out towards the top Rim you can see how we're seeing more of the longer Rays go climbing up there that's how they grow from the center out to the bark and that's part of what makes this look so good this is a type of wood that Frank Lloyd Wright used to specify specify for his homes he wanted that the medullary rays of Oak to be visible in the construction in the interior of his homes that he designed many of them absolutely gorgeous you just want to make take your time make sure that the whole surface gets coated and again really thin coat you see I've got a little bit globbed up there but that'll get taken care of in about 10 minutes I'm going to wipe off any excess here it's 10 minutes is all it takes to soak in and it'll take about two or three days for that to cure and then I'll apply another coat and what I'm going to be doing is I'll be applying multiple coats until it builds up till it looks like what you're seeing here again this will dry tomorrow and look completely bone dry look at that grain and look at those rays does medullary rays what a beautiful Bowl wow I think I can sit and stare at this all day long this is one of the reasons why I love sharing these things with you guys is the nature of it among many other reasons wow look at that well here it is a beautiful white oak Live Edge bowl look at that grain pattern look at that texture look at these medullary Rays over here it's almost like tiger stripes up along the side those are the the grain that go from the pith or the center of the tree out to the bark so they're radiating out and they go out across here and that's why they cross the annual growth rings absolutely gorgeous piece now I'm a little concerned with this because Oak and bark staying on are notorious for coming apart so this is obviously going to contract a bit as it dries It's relatively thin it lost a lot of moisture on the exterior last night but it still has a lot of a lot to go as far as drying the other thing with Oak is there's tannins in here and there's different I want to see their oils there might be somebody out there that knows better that can correct me but it's almost as if there's different substances in the oak that really slow the drying process and make it take sometimes it takes forever sometimes it feels like the oak is never really dry I will keep applying coats of the Danish oil on this because this is going to keep soaking it up and it's going to keep looking rather dry until it it reaches a saturation point now what I'm going to do with that Danish oil is I'm going to let those cure for two to three days each layer so that they work their way in and penetrate the wood really well and I'm doing that up on the bark if you notice as well I'm I want that bark to absorb it as well that improves the chance that the bark may stay on but as this contracts this bark can can come off pretty easily if it does it's not a big deal we could just break off all of the bark and then we can sand that top camian rim and it still looks gorgeous it does look a little bit better with the bark but it will look good without the bark if the bark comes off all in all I am really pleased with this piece and it's it's super exciting the other thing to know about Oak White Oak in particular is because of those medullary rays in here they are pulling the annual annual raise or annual Grain Lines so this is perfectly smooth right now because it came off the lathe and I sanded it nice and smooth however as this dries and those different tensions are happening inside this wood it's going to have this rippled effect and it's almost like bacon like cooked bacon after it dries so don't be discouraged if your piece feels rough or bumpy as it's drying that's just part of dealing with Oak and it's a cool characteristic you just need to be ready for it and know that that's going to happen all right guys let me know what you think of this bowl leave me a comment below I greatly appreciate that and if you haven't already yep click that like button and subscribe if you're not already subscribing be sure to check out my website turnawoodbull.com over there I have tons of information waiting for you if you're thinking about turning wood bowls or if you've been turning wood bowls for years there's tons of information there and great resources so you're going to want to check that out so head over to turnerwoodbull.com and check out all the great information all right guys thank you so much for watching and as always happy turning [Music] thank you

Channel: Turn A Wood Bowl

Views: 133,973

Keywords: Log to Bowl — Woodturning Video, log to bowl, wood bowl turning, wood turning video, wood turning, woodturning, Kent Weakley, Turn a wood bowl, wood bowl, bowl gouge, log, bowl turning, bowl turning techniques, bowl turning videos, how to, make a wood bowl, wood bowl making, wood bowls, wood lathe, wood turning bowl, wood turning bowls, woodturning bowl, woodturning tools, woodturning videos, woodturning videos bowls, Woodturning log

Id: YpKiLFoBITk

Length: 48min 45sec (2925 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 15 2023