Woodturning - Back to my Roots, Five Natural Inlayed Bowls!

everybody it's Jim from sprag woodturning this week we're gonna do five natural inlays in some really beautiful Walnut including two inlays that I've never shown here on the channel these really make some awesome bowls please stick around to find out how I did it well this should make the inlay purists happy uh my future daughter-in-law informs me that they have three weddings this year and she's looking for a couple of gifts for some other people and uh she wanted inlaid bowls so that's what all these five are I'm gonna do five bowls for her uh I know that we haven't really been doing a whole lot of this but um that's what this video is going to be first things first we're going to put a glue block on the bottom of each one of these and then that way we can uh pump them out so this really brings me back to my production days in my production days when I was doing shows I would do about I don't know about 20 to 25 of these a week usually larger bowls than what you see here so the first thing I want to do is clean off any anchor sealants on the bottom and as you've seen there was a box full of uh waste blocks with homemade face plates I think it's all I've got 25 of them and you know for me this is the most efficient way to go about doing this I would do them in batches of 20 25 and kind of just do the whole assembly line process while doing so electric frying pan if you're new here and haven't seen this before it's full of hot milk glue if you didn't see last week's video This Is The Hot Melt glue that I use comes from Canadian Tire comes in a pack 50 but really any hot milk glue should work so all I do is take the waste Block it's mounted on my homemade face plates dip it in the glue don't spare it now these are twice turned bowls so you know they're relatively thick I just push it down and then look down over top of it line it up best I can and because the bowls are already have a one inch thickness on them then there's lots of room to to uh turn stuff away so that it that's one let's do the rest you should be able to pick up one of these electric frying pans at a yard sale or something like that uh I get asked a lot of times what temperature do I keep it on well it's on Max that way I don't have to wait for it uh you know having lots of glue on the bottom of that glue block is so important so don't spare it right so I usually only keep about a quarter of an inch to a half inch of glue inside here the reason for that is I can plug it in and it will be up to temperature in no time if you've got a lot more glue in here then it's gonna you know take a lot more than that time wise but getting kind of low there you go that'll melt down and it'll be ready for the next time all right I got three gouges sharpened and ready to go let's get her done foreign of the Turning is going to be done with the 5 8 ball gouge by David Ellsworth which is a made by Crown and you'll see me use the Hercules a little bit to trim back a couple inlays but for the most part it's just bull gouge this week I had really hoped on doing the first part of this video in real time and then just shooting the time lapse but just because of the length of this video I had to speed the footage up but you'll get a good sense of how I trim up these bowls probably doing any inlays so the goal is to just get these trimmed up and get them ready for the inlays and just pay attention to close attention to the gouge how it's presented to the wood as I enter into the rim area you'll notice that the gouge is on its side or at 45 degrees anyway so there's going to be some Kickback from that but once you can get that bevel running then you can turn the flutes of the gouge up and you'll see it go above Center and drop down into the very base of the bowl the tool was actually sticking on the tool rest so I had to clean that up with a burmo pad if you have little dings and nicks in your tool rest you should really follow them down that way the gouge will kind of flow well across the the top of the tourist if you don't do that sometimes it's going to be really hard to get a real steady clean cut if you know what I mean so this ending is in real time and as you can see I'm starting with 60 grit and so all of my bowls that are in this category only get sanded to 320. I don't think you really need to go much higher than that if you wanted to you go higher on the inlay but I typically find that 320 will give you a good surface so that's why I usually don't go any higher than that unless it's resin so I started at the very Outer Rim worked my way in you can see that how slow I'm going the lathe is at a thousand RPM back it up once flatten the rim this isn't a real necessity at this point but I don't know I prefer to have the rim nice and flat keep in mind that you're gonna have an inlay in this and it's going to be either sanded or trimmed back but I like to keep it flat and then back in and this I'll do this two or three passes and then I'll shut the lathe off and have a look at it so after two passes here it actually is looks pretty good and then the next grit the drill will be in the other direction and then the lathe will be in reverse and keep doing that until you get a nice beautiful surface all right so this piece is sanded to 180. you can see where I guess that was maybe a branch growing through there there's a little crotch area because this would have been the heart the very the pith of the tree would have been right here just like this so what I'm going to do here is actually put some tape over the outside of this and then on the inside this here is all Side Green so you know it typically doesn't stain trying to get the camera to show that better it typically doesn't stain slide as much as the end grain will and you know for for the folks at home that are watching that aren't wood Turners so you know this this bowl here there's the heart of the tree so the tree would be growing in this orientation but the very center of the tree or the pith so all of this around here on this side is considered end grain and then on the other side all of this is considered in green as well so end grain absorbs finish and glues more than Side Green does there's not even there right there that is considered Side Green so this when you pour glue on here typically doesn't stain but once you start getting into the Rings or into the end grain here then it does so anyway I'm going to throw some electrical tape on the back side of this pour from this side set it up hit it with the accelerator and then uh I'll set this aside trim some other ones and then hit it with the 180 grit just to clean it up and then hopefully this will be all filled in and we'll be able to sand to 320. so there's the tape on the back side so the glue can't run through and stain the other side so there's a little pool of it there and I'll give that you know a minute or two to kind of Wick down into there and then after that happens I'll hit it with the accelerator and I'll pull the tape off the back side and if it hasn't Wicked all the way through then I will glue the back side as well all right let's see if it's wicked all the way through I'm going to bet that it probably hasn't and it has not so you know if I wanted to I could cut this knot out of here but it's good and solid so I'm not going to bother with that the one thing that I usually will do though is fill the pith full of the glue and this is the thin stuff again that way if there's any little micro cracks it will keep it from migrating so there I'll give that about 10 minutes to set up and then uh I'll go put this one back on the lathe that way we can keep it going with this until it's done once the glue is set I grind it back with the lathe turned off then I blend it all in and sand to 320 and get ready to cut the groove for the inlay make sure that you use a sharp parting tool because what can happen is if you get some tear out on the inside of the inlay area you might through it you might see it through some parts of the inlay where it's just clear glue or clear resin all right I'm going to be using waterloox medium sheen on all these bowls so that's what this is one of the important tasks from the finish right now is to get it down inside of that inly area that way the CA glue can't Wick through the end grain and be seen on the inside and the outside of the bowl there you go that thirsty Walnut sure drank that finish up uh you can't tell at all where that was glued there's our little crack right here trying to get the light to hit that correctly so you can see it everything looks normal on the back side there's where the knot came through and again there's no color difference at all there so you know you'll notice that maybe the door is open first coat of finish I'm not too concerned about the door being open and stuff being embedded in it this is just a protection coat so that when we do the inlay if there's any glue runs or resin runs then it's not going to stain the the wood so any coats that I put on after this though I usually usually make sure to shut one door that way there's no airflow through the shop and crap getting embedded into the Finish all right that's it for me today we will set up a time lapse video and I'll do the other four uh tomorrow or the next day not sure but uh man you can't beat that Walnut sure is pretty stuff and I know it's a little hard to see but there's a lot of really nice figurative grain in this bowl too all right see you next uh see you tomorrow I've been asked to show basically body position with the gouge so that was one of the main ideas with with doing the time lapse here and I realize it may be fast but you know I don't show all of the bowls completely being done like this but I will show um what they look like after the first coat of finish so as I'm going along you'll see me use some starbond uh filling some cracks or little areas that I want to do but other than that uh I do show that the bowls after the first go to finish there's the second one there was a little bar conclusion right here I just filled that with the thin CA glue I didn't think there's any need to remove it backside looks pretty nice too there's where that comes through that Branch I glued that as well some nice chatoyance there this is a crotch piece by the way number three coming up there's number three kind of cool there was a branch coming down through there so that's why there's two pists right here but they're good and solid no cracks in them so I decided to leave it lots of nice chatoyance right here real pretty Bowl actually finish running I'm going to wipe that off at this stage I don't really care about the Finish if it runs because it's going to be sanded away anyway before the second coat goes on but you know it's best to get rid of any of these runs if you see them all right that's it number uh number four coming up in order to trim some length I did in fact delete the footage from the third one being turned hopefully everybody can understand that I want to show this one because there's actually an inlay that I put in this that will give you a real natural look all right so what I have here is coffee grinds is what this is these aren't used they're new I've got a little bit of a hole to fill in here not very much it doesn't go all the way through to the other side so I think I'll throw some coffee in here that way it's the same color as the bowl is and then that way we're not forced to actually use the same inlay in the rim as we would down here again I'm going to use the thin there you go I don't see an old void I'll give that about 10 minutes I heard enough and then I'll trim this up again and then we'll sand this one so there is number four here's the area that we filled in with the coffee might do a little better job of that later on neat little couple of eyes here for no apparent reason yeah it's just a beautiful piece of Walnut number five so at the beginning I said that I'd sharpened three gouges and to be honest with you I have probably five or six some of them are getting kind of short and I mean as you grind them and you know I like a sharp gouge so I probably grind more often than a lot do your gouges will get shorter so what a lot of times I'll do is use the short gouges on the outside of the piece and then the longer ones I'll use on the inside and I didn't have to sharpen any more of the three gouges that was more than enough to take care of these five bowls and there's the last one nice and clean one little thing in it there all right well that's it for me see you tomorrow when we put me in lays in beautiful Canadian black walnut all right so here are the five inlay materials that we're going to use this is muscle shells we've got some oyster here turquoise malachite I called this wrong the first time I did an inlay on this and man I've taken it ever since so it's malachite and abalone uh I actually had to watch a YouTube video to see how they basically polish this Abalone up it's got it outer crust on the outside of it that needs to be cleaned away this was sent to us by James and uh well it chewed up pretty good whatever is eating that it's certainly chewed it up quite a bit so in the video they had a bunch of Diamond Stones which I really don't have and uh one they actually poured an acid on this they didn't say what kind of an acid it was so you know I'm not really want to go down that road so all I did was take this over on my CBN wheel and grind this off most of this was gone anyway so I just ground it off so that you know you can get that shimmery look through it I think that that's about as good as we're going to get with this just because of all these holes in it but you know we've never done Abalone and it should be a really cool little league so we don't need to do anything with this this is ready to use uh I do have some muscle shells already smashed up so I don't think that we need any more muscle done but I do need some oyster and this new Abalone so let's do that let's start with the Abalone uh one real big word of caution here is that all of this mother of pearl whether it's in this Abalone or it's in this muscle shells uh inside of these oyster shells anyway it is very hard on your lungs it's very toxic so you know when you're smashing it up it's probably not that big of a deal but when you've got it on the lathe and you're sanding it you need to have the dust collector right there collecting the dust and you should be wearing a self-powered respirator to protect your lungs mother Pearl is very dangerous for your lungs pretty interesting stuff almost seems like this top layer you can maybe get rid of it again this is my first time ever working with the stuff so I just don't know because it just really doesn't seem to be a ton of color inside of it certainly is there I should mention that this is a steel plate this is a four inch conduit piece and I just use that to keep the stuff from flying all through the workshop when I'm hammering on it so this is a sieve and it's I think it's 1 16 of an inch in size so of course I mean ideally we're going to use pieces like this space them around the rim if you have the ability to cut it with a diamond saw then that would be really cool too but don't have so this is the method we're gonna have to do but I need to filter out all the fine pieces of this because we don't want that because I find it makes the inlay look dirty there that almost looks like it's got more dirt in it than anything really sand foreign just kind of pick through this and pick out the real big chunks ones that I don't think will fit into the groove there I think that's going to be enough or in the area in these bowls isn't very large get something to put that in [Music] now for the oyster shells this is the first time showing here me doing oyster shells but uh when you're smashing them up you're going to find that they're kind of um kind of connected they don't smash apart typically like most shells do anyway the ones that I've used in the past I haven't but these um for the life of me I can't remember who sent these to me they also sent us some muscle shells so please uh in the comments tell the folks who sent them to me I would appreciate it because I just lost the details to it and when I'm doing these oyster shells I typically get rid of the ugly stuff like that it's okay if some of it is in it but you know I prefer not to have it in there [Music] uh there you go it's almost pure white here's my little oyster container first a shell container stuff looks kind of dirty so this here is really good inlay material it's it's on here so we'll keep all that and I guess along with that I'll just throw that in there too again I don't think that we're going to need a lot of this so I'm just going to do open one for now I don't know I might have to do another one there that should be lots all right we're going to start with the Abalone on this one [Music] of course Abalone is I'll call that a higher end shell so the goal that I was trying to do here was to inlay larger chunks of it in a flat orientation if it goes in on its side then you're not really going to get that color and that Shimmer that you're looking for I'm just going to nip off some pieces that are too big so I did my best to fill in any of the voids uh but you know in the end because it was so piece of the inlay were so large I had a hard time doing that well she's certainly chunky more than I usually do that's for sure there I think this is going to look pretty good uh what I'm going to do is put the material in all the bowls and then we'll either use the CA glue or resin all at the same time well I don't have enough muscle shells I guess I am going to have to do some be right back so what I will do with a lot of shell inlays is I'll leave a lot of them fairly large in size and then crush up some smaller ones to fill in around around them again that size variation I find looks better than just one specific size there I think that one's ready the other one should be easier hopefully it's taking a long time all right so here is the turquoise and this actually was sent to us by Jim D along with the malachite same deal thanks again Jim I'm gonna leave a little channel for the glue to sit in here because I'm going to need it to migrate through this inlay so best to leave a little Reservoir if you can this is the malachite so the turquoise and the malachite were able to be tooled back and I knew that I was going to be able to do that so it's important to get that inlay laying in there nice and flat and evenly throughout the inlay area that way you don't do it have to do as much trimming you that's ready to go one left all right and there's the last one it's gluten time for all the inlays we're going to use the stir Bond thin I debated on maybe using some uh some resin but I think that we'll just stick with the CA glue from store bottom there that's the first one we'll set this aside and get the other ones very carefully all right so I've been leveling these so this is level-ish there that's got a reservoir of glue on it so that's good set that aside we're not going to use any accelerator or any of these pieces that would be bad don't want any foaming this is the abalone due to the coarseness of this shell material and the muscle shells I probably could have got away with using medium I wouldn't be able to do it with the oyster shell because there was too much fine material on it that's about all the glue that I'm going to put in there I'm going to assume that this is going to be really hard to sand back so it's best to leave the glue below the surface of the wood and then that way when it comes to sanding it it's a lot easier to sand back if it is very similar to Moon shells and muscle shells and other shells that I've worked with in the past one more all right this is the last one this is the muscle shell all right if you're curious to do all these inlays with the CA glue it took three ounces I filled it and then I just filled it again and it's about a half a bottle if you can see that so you know that's not bad so what I'm going to do is let these sit right where they're at overnight I will Top up the inlay material if it has gone down or the glue if it's gone down and we will see you tomorrow when we grind these back should be some pretty nice inlays in here really curious to see that Abalone is going to look like when it's done anyway we'll see you tomorrow all right so it is the next day and we're going to grind the inlay back some of them are proud of the surface and we're going to use some 60 grit on a six inch random orbital sander so what I'll do is grind back every one of these and we'll fill every one of them the same but I want to start with the Abalone because I'm really curious what see what it's going to look like I said earlier dealing with this shell material it's best to just leave the glue just below the surface of the wood that way when you're seeing when you're grinding back the inlay like I am here with these PSA backed discs from sandpaper.ca it's not really that big of a chore if that glue is right up to the very top and you're trying to grind it back you'll eat up a lot of sandpaper because the shell material is so so hard and there you go that's what it looks like after it's been initially ground back and after it's filled it'll look amazing actually really cool inlay I really like the color of it as well now of all the shells that I work with I do find that oyster is probably the easiest to sand so you could probably bring that glue right up to the very top surface of the wood and it's usually not too bad to cut it back and there you go there's an extreme close-up still got some of those little areas on the side that are going to need the fine filling but other than that this one actually uh filled in a lot better than the muscle shell and the abalone muscle shells now this is a tough one it can be very very hard to cut back sometimes you can get shells that have maybe been you know washed for a while and they're a little easier a little softer to grind back but if they're brand new shelves I do find they're very difficult to cut back and I just pick them up off the beach and I've had people send them to me obviously off their beaches as well for the turquoise and the only reason that I knew I was going to be able to Tool this is because I've already done this on the channel so that in the malachite so I knew that it wasn't going to be an issue tooling that back so you'll save some sandpaper there and once it's sanded to 60 grit it still needed some filling in some areas which you'll see here in a minute very rare that you're going to be able to do an inlay in one shot unless maybe you're using resin and it goes into the pressure pot and you've got a really deep inlay for for free able to trim it back last but not least is the malachite I think it probably cut the best out of the doing it and the turquoise but this one had more voids Left Behind as well after uh the initial sanding of 60 Grit in total to do all of the grinding back here I think I used 15 of those discs all right so for the second filling this is the Abalone a little smaller material than the first round fill this up in it that goes for everything uh we don't have to worry about the oyster shell because it's I might take some fine powder and put it in there but the muscle shell is the same thing I've mashed up a little bit finer material for the muscle shells so that it goes down and fills in all those little voids so after it's filled with the finer material of course we're going to do another application of glue so it's important to have it leveled and it's really easy to overfill it at this point and then you've got glue running down the side of your bowl there we'll set that aside hopefully it's only going to be a couple of hours or so let it sit for probably about an hour and then I'll probably hit it with the accelerator to hopefully cure things up so that we can get it back on the lathe muscle shell next so for this one I actually noticed that some of the glue from the previous day wasn't cured so I took some accelerator and sprayed it down inside there before I put the second filling in I blew it out with the air hose but there must have been some left behind but you're going to see that the glue starts to cure almost instantaneously and you'll see the vapors coming off it those these Vapors are actually quite toxic so make sure you use this in a well ventilated area uh but anyway didn't have to wait for this one to cure and just using that fine material here on the oyster shell didn't really need any large material at all in there actually uh worked out quite nicely for the turquoise there was only just a couple holes that needed to be filled so I just took my Phillips screwdriver dipped it into the inlay bag and just the little grooves in there will get out just about the perfect amount that way you don't have to pour it out and make a mess and then it gets its second application of glue as well I was pretty confident in spraying that right away I wasn't too concerned about foaming and here I'm doing the same thing with the malachite as well and I'm sure you've seen me topping on the side of these bowls with that screwdriver and really that's all you need for a vibrating device I don't think there's anything fancy or needed for that and of course it gets its second application of glue as well all right I'll probably see you in about another hour or so this is why we put a coat of finish on now that wouldn't have been so bad because it's actually on side grain but if that had gone down the end grain of a bowl it would have stained it quite deeply so you're going to see me initially cut these inlays back and then once I've sanded to 320 I usually go inside and outside the bowl there's a lot of things that you'll miss there's there'll be tiny little splatters of glue so usually I will go in and sand that first coat back and that will get rid of any of that stuff if you're curious like I had to do another filling there um the Malachite and the turquoise were actually I think I only had to do one filling on the turquoise the malachite was three fillings pretty much all of the shell fillings except for the oyster shells that took probably four or five fillings one of the irritating things about working with shell material is that when you're sanding it you'll expose a void you'll take it off the lathe you'll fill that void and then you you'll put it back on the lathe and start sanding and then you'll expose another void so you know it's it at times it seems to be a never-ending cycle but if you stick with it then you'll certainly have a nice result now most of these inlays came from me trying to be different from others once I once I retired and start from Once I retired from the Army and then started doing shows you know I would go to a show and there's it was very hard to be unique in these shows and so I had been doing these inlays for a very long time prior to that and it was just a natural progression did to do these to do these inlays and be different from my other competitors so you know I'm really glad that I've got this in my inventory and you know it's a tough business to make a buck in so you know this is one of the things that if you're thinking about getting into this business make yourself unique and you will definitely be successful and seeing what that Apple only looks like I wish I would have had that in my inventory back then all right again this is the water Luxe medium Sheen and uh should be interesting once we get this on here to get a good look at it and see um see what it really truly looks like with a finish on it so this will definitely take another coat hoping that camera is picking that up it's kind of hard to really show off but I really like the look of it now the wood didn't absorb this much finish this time around even though I sanded pretty much the majority of it off there's a really nice bun in that bowl she's beautiful especially that area right there all right let's get a look at the other ones with the second coat there's one of the fan favorites muscle shells right in the center of this bowl it's got lots of chatoyance there compression green around that knot another beautiful piece of Canadian black walnut number three Kona there's the turquoise very pretty indeed very clean looking bowl very nice number four coming up that green is awesome as well for sure it's another really clean Bowl as well number five is coming up lastly there's the oyster shell almost pure white now because this video is already way too long tomorrow I'm going to buff with the Tripoli buffing compound use the denatured alcohol to clean it off and put third coat on and then we'll see you at the end when we're doing the bottoms all right so that's it for the video uh as you can see the glue blocks are basically on all of them uh these require another coat of finish and it's Thursday so gotta finish this up this wasn't really so much about the wood more about the the inlay and I think this is the stair of the show this is the abalone and again I will put some rotating footage up at the end showing this off as well uh very distinct color from any of the other mother of pearl type shells that I've worked with so uh thanks again for sending that along I mean it's really cool I'd hoped to get more pieces like this and again I don't know if the cameras picked that up or not kind of facing upwards so it kind of looks like that all the way around it it's probably about half you'll see it in the rotating for each at the end so that's the Abalone and it's certainly something new that we haven't done and I think it's really cool the other one that we haven't done is oyster shell and there's what it looks like it's actually quite easy to work with in sand so if you're looking for a a shell it's it's easier on your tools and sandpaper than oyster shell is it now this one is one of my most popular and very hard to keep in stock and that is the muscle Shield inlay now that I'm here on YouTube I just don't have any production time I can work these inlaid bowls in here and there to get them done but for the most part uh it's very tough to do finish on this is actually pretty nice but I'll put another coat on it just like the others but you know that the uh the muscle shell inlay is certainly very very popular and hey they're just on the beach you know number four is the malachite dark green again another very easy inlay to work with tooled back very brilliantly with the Hercules I can't say what it'd be like with the gouge but I think that it goes well in this dark walnut Bowl and last but not least is turquoise and that also tooled and sanded brilliant brilliantly as well now you know I could have I could have used um I could have used resin as The Binding agent in these uh I just decided to stick with the CA glue we haven't really done a lot of CA glue inlays natural inlay so that's one of the reasons why I did that um if you did use a resin I would definitely recommend putting it in a pressure pot uh you're going to see though that it's going to dip like this inside of the inlay and that's not so much a bad thing when you're dealing with the turquoise and the malachite well same thing with the shell material I guess as well but you know it's for me the CA glue as long as you don't use the accelerator on the first pour that's going to be your you know that's how you keep bubbles out of your work and by sealing the inside of that Groove that's another thing that will help prevent bubbles from coming into that CA glue as it cures same thing would apply for resin as well so that's that's the fact that you put the uh the finish in there to prevent that and to also prevent the CA glue from wicking through and then seeing it on the outside rim of the bowl that's the two reasons why I like to put the fish on the inside all right well that's it uh next week we're going to be doing a very unique wedding Bowl something that we haven't seen before so please come on back for that and of course if you want to be entered into the three gallon kit at a hundred thousand subscribers slow getting there I'll tell you it's things have really slowed down on my subscriber count so if you haven't subscribed please consider doing that but uh if you want to be entered into that drop put designer epoxy in the comments down below and of course by putting a comment down below you'll also be entered into my bowl giveaways at every five thousand so I think we'll probably be sitting at 93 maybe when this airs and um so yeah we're getting there slowly but surely so the next giveaway will be at 95 000 so please leave a comment down below all right well that's it take care stay safe don't forget the Bell please share my videos with your friends and of course that thumb up thumbs up will always help as well all right see you next week [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Sprague Woodturning

Views: 32,825

Keywords: walnut, inlay, natural inlay, starbond, mussel shells, oyster shells, woodturning, wood turning, woodworking, petawawa, ontario, ottawa, hunter tool systems, sandpaper.ca, waterlox

Id: _jKlPo0NvC0

Length: 50min 26sec (3026 seconds)

Published: Fri May 05 2023