Woodturning - Coring a Walnut Log

hi everybody welcome to sprague wood turning so in this video we are going to process the walnut that i got last week so that's what this video is going to be uh it's going to be just general roughing out uh chainsaws um and corn i'm going to do probably a lot of corn i want to see if i can get a large number of bowls out of one blank so that's what this video is going to be so if you're new here please consider subscribing uh you know anytime you hit that like button it certainly helps out my channel as well so it's really hot so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to block this up split it in half and then get it in the shop and then we'll we'll talk about it because it's just too hot over here [Music] [Music] um [Music] ah [Music] [Music] [Music] hmm [Music] [Music] okay i said i'd talk about these once uh we got them in out of the sun i was i cut if you haven't seen any of my other roughing videos i have you know i always cut the hearts out of the bowl blanks you don't want to leave the the center the heart of the tree in any of your bowl blanks if you're relatively new to turning so these are not a loss you can see this one's got some really bad splits in it but from here to here are basically small cutting boards if you will there's a lot of nice wood here so what i'll do with a lot of these is i will actually turn them into spoon blanks or anything like that and um so yeah i mean like here to here this is all good wood we just don't want the heart in any of our bowls so that's what i was doing if you're curious if you're new to turning if not then you're like yep that's exactly how i do it now this one log on the end it had splits like this so the problem with this is this is kind of risky to turn if you've got a crack that goes all the way through a bowl blank well it certainly can fly apart and come off and hit you and really do some damage to you so i poured some glue down in here and i think it goes to here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to cut this off on the bandsaw and hopefully it's good wood below that and then we can just get rid of all that and again you could use this for bottle stoppers you know smaller smaller stuff like that anyway i'll show you how i round these on the bandsaw and then we'll get to the lathe okay so if you haven't seen my roughing girls and logs video i'll briefly go over what i do with the bandsaw here so the swing on my lathe is actually 20 inches and so i always use a 19 inch template for anything that's pinched between centers and the reason for that is you'd have to have a perfect circle in order for it to spin and the likelihood of that is very remote so i initially put the 19 on here but found that it actually is going to miss here on the sides so this this will start at 18 inches on this bulb blank so i just set it up center it i just use a phillips screwdriver high tech so i'll take that over the bandsaw round it once it comes off i use a spade bit and um this is a little bit larger than my live center on my tail stock i'll drill down through the bark and then that way when i'm setting the bowl blank onto the the um the lathe it actually can rest on here so you're not really wrestling with it so we kind of rest it on the tail stock and then bring it up forward and center it up the way you want to so anyway that's basically how i round everything once around it i take them over and place them uh i put some plastic over them i don't put it tight because i don't want them to get moldy um time is the enemy right now once you've cut this stuff up it's you mean it's starting to crack already so you know you got to get it done anyway that's basically how all the bowls around it i prefer rounding everything before it goes onto the lathe because it is much much faster to cut this in a circle than it is to knock all these corners off on the lathe so it's best to do it on the bandsaw earlier you remember i showed i put some glue on this one i said i'm gonna cut it off so it pretty much ends there there might be a little bit of a split further in but by the time that bowl blank gets whittled away um that crack should be totally gone so the next step is to rough the outsides of these i'll throw an end grain sealer on them uh so that they don't they don't crack on me and once i've got them all the all the outside profiles done i will do some coring anyway nothing goes to waste all these offcuts they'll be burned for firewood okay so we're getting ready to about this on the lathe um all i use is a drive center and a live center and uh this is the one way chuck and the spur drive that goes with it and you know what um this is really all you need just make sure that and i'll show you i'll dig these in deep and then continue cranking down until i really can't tighten it anymore it's not going to go anywhere uh i've also taken a forstner bit and hollowed this out this mark is so thick that it was going to ride on the live center so the original hole is still there from the spade bit but i i've just used a forstner bit to make it larger so it doesn't hit [Music] so balancing the bowl is important and what i mean by that is end grain end grain so that you haven't got a lot of heart on this side and hardly any on the other so that's the main reason why i do this line that up and then we'll get a look at it now i find it's a little heavy on this side so lay that down like that now that throws your your bowl out of balance but in the end when this is whittled down to here and this is the same the bowl will look more balanced uh when it's sitting on the table or you know when it's mediums uh the other thing is when i initially turn the lathe on i have a variable speed lathe i have that luxury um i dial it down turn it on pick up the speed until i get vibration and then just back it off there and then as you whittle this away and make it more round you should be able to increase the speed so so look at that beautiful stuff i like these uh natural edge walnut bowls with the contrast and color between the early wooden light wood so anyway i'll just cut this foot in and uh that'll be it i've showed this in other videos sorry sorry about the background the noise but i gotta have a fan on it it's just too hot so you know this is just kind of the gauge this is the biggest foot that my stronghold trucks will take with the number two jaws i think number two number three cameron this is the smallest so a bowl this size i want to make it pretty much as big as i can to give me lots of gripping power lots of mass when we core so that's what i'll be doing if you see me using it that's covered on other videos too so yeah there we go hopefully the uh the bark will stay on this we've got a nice easy transition here and again the plan is to pour these [Music] so i thought i'd show you this so i'm finally got all these profiles roughed out now there are 12 now this is just one log so i've got uh 12 really large bowl blanks so now i'm going to do some coring and the hope is to get an additional two more bowls per blank out so if we've got 12 now hopefully we're going to end up with 36 so that's what's up next okay so i'm just going to briefly explain um this system again it's all explained on the um huge maple burl and cherry crotch coring videos check that out but essentially i have a 20 inch lathe this is the base that goes along with the one-way coring system um and so this bowl here is 15 inches now if this was say a 19 inch bowl blank i would use my number four to take out or to set the rig because that will give me the biggest bowl on the biggest core sorry so this is a smaller bowl so that means i'll use my number three so i use the number three spacer goes up against my banjo goes up against the lathe headstock and then this and then the base of the unit right up against it put the number three knife on there and bring it out to where you want how thick you want your outside bowl to be and if you're new to turning is typically one inch for every um 10 inches in diameter so if this is 15 inches this outside bowl blank should be an inch and a half thick so i'm just roughly doing this right now i'll put that there that's about roughly an inch and a half i'll lock this down snug it up this is not you know i try to always do it but i don't think that it's like an absolutely crucial thing but square the jig up to lay the bed things are square that's typically always better and then lock it down now if i wanted to i could turn the lathe on and go in after i put the cutter on this of course and take out this bowl blank this big bowl blank right here but i've already got a tendon turned on on here so what i'm going to do this doesn't move from now on this is my number two setup bring the support around and you'll see in the video so the knife will ride on the support and then i'll just bring this in once i move my tail stock out of the way and take out the first bowl then once i've got the first bowl taken out this comes out i'll put my number three in and get the second bowl and then of course the outside bowl the money bowl is intact but essentially the way these are light or laid out is um in the spacers is you you're using you're leaving about an inch of thickness in the base of the bowl and that will give you more than enough room to turn another tendon on there or do whatever you want to do it okay so the base is locked down in place where i want it i remember i had my number three in here bringing it out measuring it where i want it to to be so like i said we start with number two and this is the number two so initially that will go up against here the cutter will ride on that and that will give it support and then eventually once this goes in deep enough i'll turn this around and slide it in and follow the knife as it goes in all the way to the base put this up here and we'll lock it down now i should also mention that when you do some coring you actually need a fair bit of power so if your lathe is under powered you might have some issues you might even see this to hurt this two horsepower lathe stall uh it takes a fair bit of power to do this stuff so i have my lathe down on its lowest setting it's it's most powerful torque setting and i mean i've done stuff that's pretty close to the maximum diameter of the sleeve so it gets a little tougher to do as you go down near the base of the bowl and that's because you're cutting into end grain [Music] and of course we don't want this to snap off and come flying out so you know i'm probably pretty close to stopping it now and trying it with the screwdriver trying to pop this out of there actually try that right now all of that there we go closer than i thought so there you know you've got an eight inch bowl uh lots of boat is small i really don't even like to go uh this small uh but anyway i'll grip that with the with the chuck put a put a foot on the bottom and a tendon on the bottom of it pour this out and there's our first bowl so let's go for number two right now okay so i've got my number three knife the number three [Music] support i should also mention you'll see me extracting the knife and cleaning it off you'll have to do that as you go in usually out near the uh the top of the bowl it's usually not that big of a deal but as you go deeper into the bowl you have to extract it regularly and clean it off so [Music] like i said i would prefer to pop it out this way and have it flying across the room and potentially eating i like walnut but i don't like it that much [Music] there you go i'll just flatten the bottom on this and there you go this has got an even wall thickness all the way through it just do the bottom and that bowl is done clean this one out measure the wall thickness and it's done as well okay so this is a 17 inch natural edge i don't feel comfortable turning this without the tail stock in place this is a pretty big piece of wood i've got the extender in and i've actually got a little block of wood uh and i mean i've just got pressure pushing this way to hold it in the chuck um again check the chuck regularly through turning because maybe it'll vibrate loose uh so on and so on but you know what this is all i've really got i've got this set about one and three quarters of an inch in thickness on the outboard end it's going to corrode this big block uh we'll stick stick it aside i'll pinch it between centers and put a foot on it mount it back in the chuck and uh core out the next one so we'll be able to get three out of this so this will be the one i'll show this one kind of all the way through it and then um maybe some shots of some other ones i'm gonna core and that's it [Music] [Music] [Music] so so something i want so what we got we got a about 12 and a half inches is what this bowl is here so i should be able to do another one and uh that'll be it so okay so we are all done coring um so as you can see i said originally that i was looking for what was it 36 and we ended up with 30. some of them just aren't worth doing again uh if you tried to core that again it's going to be nothing on what it's pretty much just sapwood now anyway so you know walnut's supposed to be a dark color and not white so i don't see the i don't see the um the point in doing that and a lot of these bowls you might even say are pretty much just well there's not much you can do with it there's there's a good example of what that would look like if it was cored again so you know the big money is in the second bowl and if you look at if you look at the cost of finished products that i have here it would pay for the coring rigs that i have and then some you know if you've got if you've got 12 large bowls that you know when finished are between 10 and 12 inches in diameter well you know that should be anywhere between 12 and fifteen hundred dollars canadian and finished product well that pays for that entire system so it's worthwhile getting one if you do any amount of uh bowls at all really and you know it'll probably pay for itself the first big log that you get so anyway these just have to be trimmed up for thickness they're not the especially the big outer bowl and then i'll get an end grain sealer on them and that's it they'll be in the drying shed okay so that's it for the video um sorry if it's so long and bored you i find it very difficult to show all the steps involved in taking a bowl from log form uh to a rough thick form and if you're curious the um the the worst part about any of the the the roughing out is getting it basically the outside round to this profile you want and that typically has taken me anywhere from a half hour to 45 minutes ish in there per bowl it depends on the bowl the natural edge bowls take more time to do because you have to little whittle away more material where the conventional bowls like this where if you just basically strip off the bark you've got a bowl shape but when you do natural edge of course you're going the other way so there's a lot more material to remove and speaking of that there's a couple of our big bowls i think that's uh probably 16 inches something like that 16 17 inches and this was the core that was in it and the great thing about the cores is they're pretty much all dark walnut i believe these are english walnut there seems to be a lot of uh sapwood on them so i think that's what they are and that's fine that'll still make a beautiful bowl i'm what's called a twice turn turner so i rough things up thick put them in the shelf in my drying shed for two or three months to dry and then i'm running through my freezer kilns which i'll do a video on whenever i get an old upgrade freezer to do it because i know i get a lot of interest in that too but i i can't do one until i get an operate freezer so i need my my bowl stick and the other thing too that i'm known for is i do a lot of inlays in the rims so in order to do an inlay in the rim you have to have that thickness so anyway hopefully everything was clear enough for you um and again every time you hit that thumbs up you certainly help my channel and if you haven't subscribed please consider subscribing i've looked in my analytics and i noticed that a lot of the people that are watching my videos actually haven't subscribed to my channel so uh if you could do that that would be awesome thank you very much so anyway next two or three videos are going to be on inlays i'm going to get back on that i know it's a very popular thing so i want to get back to it but anyway till then stay safe take care and we will see you at the next video you

Channel: Sprague Woodturning

Views: 206,950

Rating: 4.8903122 out of 5

Keywords: woodturning, wood turning, walnut, chainsaw, roughing out, bandsaw, sprague woodturning, spraguewoodturning.ca, oneway, coring, uc coatings, uccoatings

Id: mzo52zpVFE4

Length: 36min 55sec (2215 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020