Shattered Plywood River Bowl || #rocklerplywoodchallenge

so the guys are the modern maker podcast which I totally recommend it's really good they just announced this contest a while ago where you have to build something using only a sheet of plywood and then you can use some other stuff like glue and screws and stuff like that if you want to um and as soon as they announced it my immediate reaction was I want to do that I just finished this huge project that was basically plywood cabinets that I had to put in and it was kind of a nightmare and I don't really like building stuff out of plywood and I'm not like such a huge furniture builder to begin with really rather do something on the lathe right now I really like making bowls and I'm like I can't make a bowl out of plywood no wait no I could totally do that okay let's do that so you're supposed to use nothing but a sheet of plywood for this build and then glues and screw and whatever this is about a half a sheet of plywood that I had leftover and this here is a big chunk of particle board and I'm ripping the particle board cross cutting it into some small pieces and then I'm gonna make a box out of it I have an idea to make a bowl that combines broken plywood and colored resin together and I need a container that's gonna hold all of that so I glue the size of the box together and then pin them real quick with my brad nailer and then I've got a complete box and since I'm going to be using resin I really don't want it to stick to the inside and I don't want it to leak so I'm gonna paint the entire interior with clear lacquer trying to waterproof it and make it look less sticky I'm also going to put on this piece of clear lexan so that it's better for filming and also so I can see what's going on while I'm pouring the resin and it's not all just a mystery to me so I've got some epoxy holding that on and I'm also using a lot of screws I need all the seams to be waterproof and so I'm just using this silicon caulk here I own a caulk gun but I don't honestly like messing around with it I love the silicone caulk in the tube because you can just put it on and it works really well and then I'm ripping the actual pieces of plywood down to about ten inches in width there's some tape and junk because they're left over from another project and I'm cross-cutting them and I think there are about 10 individual pieces and as I kept working they got smaller and smaller and that was intentional it'll make sense why I did that a little bit later on here I have them all stacked together and you can see them getting smaller and I'm making this diagonal line here and that's where I'm gonna break all of these pieces so turns out plywood is actually very difficult to break specifically because it's engineered to be difficult to break so I had to come up with this really complicated setup where I weakened it with the drill then I do a pilot hole and then I run my jigsaw through it trying to break the stuff I actually tore my vise off my bench at one point and had to remount it so I really had to give it some thought turns out the best thing to do is to put these screw clamps on and then jerk them back and forth and I'm pretty much pulling on them as hard as I can and even with that cut and those screw holes it's still very difficult to get this stuff to break but it eventually breaks and it does it in this very splintery ragged way which is exactly what I'm looking for this is gonna give me the look that's gonna make this bowl really dramatic and interesting you can see all the pieces stacked up and all the ragged ends and I'm gonna be using resin with this and I don't want it to stick to the Container too much so I have this carnauba wax and I'm just gonna do a coat of that all over the inside I don't have any mold release spray and I'm too cheap to buy some but this should work makes perfect sense I'm stacking the different pieces of plywood here and I'm using a lot of blue much more than I would usually use because I don't want the resin leaking in between the different sheets of ply when I pour it in so I put on a lot of wood glue and then I stack the plywood and then I put these pieces of railroad track on top as clamps this probably took me two or three days because I would only do two maybe three layers at once and I'd let them dry overnight and then add more with a lot of weight on top to keep everything really well compressed now that the whole thing and I'm ready to start pouring the resin this is just family would bar top resin it's probably the cheapest two-part epoxy you can get but it has a lot of advantages like for instance you can color it with regular food coloring so I'll leave links to the food coloring and the resin down the description if you want to experiment with this stuff it's only about $22 a quart which is a pretty good price for a decent two-part resin and I've got 25 drops of food coloring in this first batch it's really dark and the idea is that I'm gonna add a little bit less coloring with each pour so that the resin gets clearer and clearer and looks more like glass here's the first pour you can see this time lapse spread oh and this bubble that I got I really liked the way that looked on camera and I'm continuing the poor's this is probably poor number two so it's 20 drops here's poor number three it's only got 15 drops of coloring in it and starting to get later and now I want to take up some space so I can save some resin I'm gonna turn away all the middle on the lathe anyway so I just jammed some scraps of wood in there and here's my next resin pour and I'm probably down to ten drops then this one is five drops of color and you can see I'm getting this nice turquoise color it's really changing color beautifully as I go up further pouring mold and this is my last pour right here and I'm down to three drops of color here so it's almost totally clear and but it's done which is good because it took three quarts of resin and now it's 72 hours to cure so there's a lot of waiting but after three days it's done I mean I was hoping it would come out of the mold easily but all of that clear lacquer and wax none of that made any difference it's still stuck in there as much as it possibly could have so I just took an old framing chisel and pounded it down in the sides as hard as I could and they were pretty tough to get off you can even see with this side here with the chunks of ply that were stuck to the sides it didn't do any good to wax and now I finally have this giant chunk of resin and plywood and it's a little intimidating I have to turn a bowl out of this thing the first thing I have to do is get rid of these pieces of wood sticking out and since it won't fit on my bandsaw or my table saw I just use a rips off for that and whenever I'm working on the lathe I really like to be precise I find the exact center and then I draw a circle around that so I know exactly what I'm keeping and what's gonna be waste I've got to get rid of the waste somehow and here's what I came up with this is just a cheap Harbor Freight chainsaw it cost about 40 bucks but it worked surprisingly well for this it was pretty precise it left a decent surface and I was able to quickly eliminate all the waste you might wonder why I did this since I own a bandsaw because it's awesome and it makes me look like a badass that's why and now that I've got the waste removed I can put the faceplate on and get it mounted on the lathe I got to admit I was gay a little bit nervous by this part this is definitely the biggest thing that I've ever turned it weighs 15 or 20 pounds and it's right at the limit of this lathes capacity and I'm pretty freaked out turning it on but I've come this far so here we go and okay not bad a little bit of vibration but it's pretty decent this is a Harbor Freight lathe too and it's not super robust but it'll get the job done I'm coming in here with a carbide tool first but I wasn't really happy with the way that worked so I switched over to my homemade DIY bowl gouge I've got a video on that you can check out I really like this tool for almost any kind of faceplate turning I do because it's as heavy as a carbide tool but because the tip is high speed steel you can just sharpen it as much as you want and it's always razor sharp and then after a bit of work with that I switched to this round nosed scraper this one is particularly good for anything that's like Bowl work where I want to remove a lot of material but also leave a good finish it's not as aggressive as the pointed tool but it has these nice long shavings and it leaves a surprisingly smooth surface particularly on the outside now I will admit I did have to stand there for hours getting tons of crap flung at my face and maybe it's time for me to invest in a face shield I'll probably think about that because it's not very pleasant now I'm starting to shake the the actual outside of the bowl I want it to be a kind of simple and organic shape the composition of the bowl is crazy enough that I don't need a weird shape to make it interesting I just want something that's gonna be round and pleasing and I'm sticking with the round nose scraper and doing long continuous strokes with it so that I keep that good surface and the shape can just emerge kind of organically and then I'm scraping the outside with a dedicated scraper this shot looks a little bit weird it looks like the cameras moving it's not it just can't figure out what to focus on and I decided to leave it in just because I thought it looked cool and scraper gave me an excellent surface by the time it was done and I was ready to move on to the interior of the bowl now anytime I'm doing an interior I like to start by coring out the middle it saves a ton of time it makes it a lot easier I'm using a two inch Forstner bit that I've got mounted in my lathes tailstock and that's a big bit and there's a lot of torque here so I'm just going really slowly my technique is really simple I advance the bit just one or two turns with the tailstock wheel and then I back it off and clear out all the chips if I let the chips build up too much the whole thing could bind and seize up and that would be really dangerous here I've gone as deep as I can possibly go with the tailstock I've got to unlock it and pull it all the way back and you can see how clogged the thing has become with shavings it would have been dangerous to go any further with this but it's fine the way it is now I need to hollow out down to the depth that I've drilled and I'm back with the round nose scraper again and I'm just taking those long continuous strokes spent several hours hollowing just down to the bottom of that first hole but the shape is coming out nicely the wall thickness is good and I'm about halfway down so now I need to drill it again and now I'm passed those pieces of wood filler I put in and I'm down to drilling just pure resin which leaves these hilarious like blue noodle shavings that feel really weird and funny in the hand and they look really cool and then once I've got it drilled down to by bottom depth then I hollow it out the rest of the way I'm just finishing off knocking down some of the high spots with my carbide tool and then I'll scrape it again and now I'm sanding the exterior and the inside of the bowl the scraper left a good finish so I only have to use like 150 grit and I end up with a fine surface the problem I have is this plywood is a very porous surface with a lot of end grain a lot of fibers sticking up I need to fill that in and stiffen it somehow so I give it three coats of west system epoxy let it dry overnight I've got a nice glossy finish but it's got a lot of bubbles and nibs in it so even though it looks good I've got to sand the whole thing down again to get my finish back and make it good to the touch Here I am wet sanding with mineral spirits and wet and dry automotive paper I always use mineral spirits for woodworking projects because it doesn't swell the fibers if it actually comes in contact with the wood and I go all the way to a really high grit I think it's 1500 and then I move on to swirl remover which is also a buffing compound I get that on the bowl and then spin it up to a high speed and I work with that for a while and then I switch to automotive polish and you can see I'm using a paper towel to apply all this stuff it's not as effective as a rag but you never bring a rag to a lathe that can be very dangerous paper towels a lot safer and now the finish is back to what I'm looking for it's transparent again it has that sort of sea glass or bottle glass effect that I was going for you can see my hand through it there it's really perfect now comes sort of the most nerve-wracking part I've gotten the bowl to be exactly what I wanted it to be but I've got to get it off the lathe somehow I could ruin everything here if I'm not careful and it comes flying off the lathe and shatters against the wall that's happened to me before so I'm just very carefully parting it off until the parting tool starts to hit the screws from the faceplate and I realized that I've got to take it off and do it by hand there's going around with Japanese pull saw here it's very fine it's good for the work but then I realized the saw could damage the bowl just as easily as the lathe could have so I tape up the bottom and then keep working on it going around in a circle and slowly just deepening that curve keeping a nice straight cut until I get it off now a lot of woodworkers have fancy trucks that use to flip bowls around and work on the bottom but I just use a random orbital sander and then a piece of sandpaper stuck to something flat like glass or plastic I get a great bottom that way and I don't have to mess around much and here's the final finished product and I have to say it's exactly what I thought it would be it isn't very often that I get to make something that really is the vision that I had my head and it comes out looking like what I had in mind this took me like two weeks and especially when it was just a big chunk of plywood and resin I was looking at it and thinking my god there's no way this is actually gonna turn into a bowl or something attractive but in the end it did I'd like to thank the guys at the modern maker podcast for their totally stupid I mean they're excellent they're very excellent contests they're not I'm honestly really happy to be a part of go check out their podcast if you haven't so far and if you like this video you can go check me out on patreon and look at the exclusive content and rewards I have for my supporters my patrons make my content possible and I really appreciate them so anyway I hope this was as much fun for you as it was for me thanks for watching

Channel: Rex Krueger

Views: 935,291

Rating: 4.8895068 out of 5

Keywords: rocklerplywoodchallenge, lathe, turning, woodturning, plywood, birch, resin, epoxy, modermakerpodcast, wood, woodshop, make, maker, shoplife, bowlturning

Id: 6BvWI8reOy8

Length: 14min 19sec (859 seconds)

Published: Wed May 30 2018