Woodturning - Fractal Burning Bowls

hi everybody my name is jim i'm the owner of sprague woodturning welcome to my channel so this week we are going to be doing fractal burning so i haven't done this in a while and there's probably a lot of new subscribers that haven't even looked back through my account to check these out but there's a few videos here on fractal burning anyway i'm going to cover how it's done and the safety concerns involved with it uh i have a stack of five bowls right here that have already been rough turned and sand it to 220 so all we got to do is get them saturated with the baking soda and water solution and start burning so anyway that's this week's video hopefully you enjoy it uh anytime you give my videos a thumbs up it certainly helps with the analytics and of course if if you haven't subscribed please consider doing so all right so let's get set up and we'll get to cooking up some maple all right so the mixing ratio is one cup of water to one tablespoon of baking soda and it doesn't matter what type of baking soda it is just as long as it is so what i like to do is put this in the microwave and warm it up and then add the baking soda to it after that back in a minute all right so our fluid's been warmed up i just put it in for two minutes so here's our baking soda it's hardened up on me a little bit more the mixture isn't absolutely crucial as long as you have um at least a teaspoon or sorry a tablespoon in there you'd be fine now you can use a foam brush i also have a spray bottle that i use on occasion foam brushes are good for flat work a lot of times i'll put it into the spray bottles when i'm doing curve work like on these bowls that we're about to do so anyway just make sure that this is mixed up thoroughly when it goes clear then you know that you've got it mixed up good and throughout the time that you're using it make sure you just give it a little stir every now and then and it will be mixed up properly now the bowls have been this over here the bowls have been like i said sanded uh sorry turned and sand it to 220. uh that's to open up the grain structure these will warp when they dry you're introducing a lot of water and a lot of heat if you haven't seen this before you'll be actually pretty amazed by it so anyway what i like to do with the initial dust out of it is i like to saturate the wood with it let it sit for 10 minutes or so and then when you put it on and then put it on again just before you do the fractal burning and it seems to work quite well i find the longer that it sits uh that the wood is allowed to absorb the the mixture here the the more the better the better it will work there can't talk today i try and keep it off of the tendon because i want to remount these back on the lathe and this is um this is probably the one and only time that you'll see me where i don't use a glue block on the bottom of these and the reason for that is because the uh the fractal burning produces so much heat and of course you're adding a lot of water here that it actually can delaminate from the bottom of the bowl so i just put these in a chuck you have to really um you have to get your fingerprints on it when you start putting finish on it but you know it's um it's kind of what you have to do there's really no other way around it anyway i'll do the rest of these bowls and i'll bring you back okay so i've given the bowls um a good coating of this baking soda and water solution before we start let's talk about some safety stuff here i use a microwave transformer now there are dedicated fractal burning devices on the market as far as i'm concerned anytime you're holding on to the leads with your hands you're in danger now as you can see there's no insulation on these and that's because everything the transformer is rooted through this dead man switch so i set the leads up where i want them on here the transformer gets plugged into the end of this when i push down on this the power flows through to the transformer and energizes the leads at no time ever when you see me handle these leads here is their power to them never so i set things up i back up this is sitting on a stool over here i push down on that i'm a good two to three feet away from the table while this is happening so you know uh anytime you're holding the leads in each hand if something goes wrong then the current is going to pass through your heart and that's not a good thing i know people are going to try this so this is why i'm doing this i'm going to try and show you the safest possible way to do this so um all right i guess we're ready so i usually like to start on the rim of the bowl and this is just normal house wire that i've stripped the insulation off on and twisted it back on each other and then these then leads go over to the transformer now this microwave transformer produces uh i think it's between three to five thousand volts so um they may look harmless but they certainly are not now if you want to try this and you want to use a microwave transformer and you're not familiar with the way that transformers are set up in order to do this process get yourself an electrician and tell them what you want to do and then he'll probably shake his head and tell you not to that's how dangerous this can be so i want to strike can't stress that enough that you know there have been people that have lost their lives doing this so please be careful if you're gonna attempt this anyway enough about that safety concerns um i'll talk a little bit more about it throughout the video here and you'll see exactly just how you know it's quite an impressive thing to watch but you know it is truly a dangerous dangerous thing all right see we've got so i push down on the dead man my hand's now off of the dead man and what happens is this dries out and if it dries out it won't work and the funny thing about it is you never know where it's going to start it's really got a mind of its own if you get too close to this the potential is there for it to jump in and go on to you as well so that's why i stay well back from it it really wants the perfect amount of solution in order for it to work that's a beautiful fractal forming there until things are drying out it is a finicky thing to work with i should also mention that this has to be on raw untreated wood if you try to do it on a painted surface it will not work and you can move the leads around to wherever suits you there once it makes contact you gotta let off the switch and move to a different area i'm going to soak up some of this fluid here because too much fluid in it won't work either there we go so the great thing about this is i can bend these down and i can put that into the base of the bowl i've got a block that i can set this on as well we're going to try and encourage that to grow across there contact [Applause] [Music] [Applause] there i think that's good we'll leave that the way it is back this out here that looks kind of hideous right now but trust me when this is all done it will look really cool while i mean you see it in the opening all right so what i'm doing the back side and i mean you can see why this is so dangerous you can see the water that's laying here on the table water electricity never mix or they shouldn't unless your frontal burning now the cool thing about this when it's burning on the outside it can actually be burning on the inside too so again it's just kind of you get what you get there's no real controlling it you could paint it on it in a pattern and maybe it would maybe it would kind of follow that pattern that's really about the only control that you have i'm going to try and put these where you can see them i should also have mentioned that my work is on a rubber mat and i'm standing on one as well helping to insulate me from the transformer and yes these are popular items uh a lot of people are asking for fractal burning so that's why i'm doing five of them here i probably should be doing about 30. but youtube is all consuming but i love shooting these videos now it depends on who you are i like lots of fractals my wife does not and of course there is a risk of fire so when you put these uh away to dry so you're gonna have to you know they're gonna have to go i can put these in my fridge kiln so that's not a big deal that way but of course if there's some soft areas in these bowls they can actually uh smolder away and then catch on fire which did in fact happen to me they didn't catch on fire but i put them in my clean room and um luckily it wasn't the end of the day and i walked into my cleaning room and it was full smoke so and what had happened was it just kept burning and burning and burning and um you know the potential is there to certainly have a fire so be aware of that frankenstein stuff there i think that's probably pretty good and again right now they look really hideous but uh as you've seen in the opening they will be pretty darn cool let's get the second one of course it's going the wrong way there those are a couple of nice fractals there it is so cool you just never know what you're going to get and they'll never be any two the same that's the other great thing about this number three coming up what i'll do sometimes along these main channels is i'll just hit it with the uh the solution here just to make sure that it you know it kills any sparks that may be in there before i uh put it in the clean room or in my fridge kiln number three coming up all right so i put the solution into a spray bottle and that seems to work better sometimes let's see what it does for us this time it just gives you maybe a more even um an even coat i don't know of course it's going right where you guys can't see there she goes beauty i'm just going to soak up this fluid so it continues perfect let's try it over here try and grow it down on this side so yeah that's pretty much perfect three nice fractals in there um i mean it probably would have been ideal with four but you know this is absolutely i'm not going to do any more to this perfect i had to speed up some of the footage uh when i was doing the burning uh the video itself uh had over six hours worth of editing into doing it so in order to get it all kind of in i had to speed it up so i apologize for that but there's no really way around it [Music] the crow's approved another fantastic burn there that's pretty good we've got some spalt lines here to give it a little more visual interest i'm not going to do any more than that very nice i like it and i have seen people driving nails into uh pieces of wood to do this and i have no idea why they do it because there's no need to as you can see that just sits on the surface and it works just fine without putting holes all through your work and different woods will behave differently believe it or not it's probably got something to do with the densities um i burn a lot of maple that's probably the main thing that i burn but again it's hard to believe the transformation between what you see here and what i showed you at the beginning there you know it's just this is just fighting me i don't know it's got some dry rot in there maybe um soft on one side her on the other i don't know what's going on there anyway put her in the kiln all right so i've got the kiln set at 55.5 celsius if you haven't checked these people out make sure you do so this is inside the fridge kiln if you haven't been here before there's a video on how to make one of these bathroom exhaust fan at the top a couple of lights at the bottom works fantastic so hopefully these will be all ready in the morning uh what do we got in here we got some cherry burl in here some box holder burl more box holder burl here anyway if you're looking for a fairly cheap way to dry wood this is the answer see you tomorrow all right just want to take a quick little um clip of this this this material was sent to me by jim d he's uh he's a subscriber on the channel uh comments on literally every video that i do and you know uh jim wanted to send me a gift so i'm like sure um i'll take a gift and i mean look at this this is crazy look at this stuff aluminum powder uh crushed jet black pink coral turquoise powder green machete we've got some copper it's almost dust very cool i haven't really worked with anything that fine and this is brass same thing really really cool uh thank you so much jim we're gonna do a bowl on the channel here for jim and um i mean this is this is absolutely fantastic and we'll be seeing this in upcoming videos thanks again i really appreciate it all right so it's been a couple days uh this is my moisture meter there's actually a link in the description for one of these if you're interested you just set it to whatever usually i'd stick it in the wood and then rotate the dial until the light comes on and that tells you the percentage moisture percent anyway it's set at six right now let's see what we got if the light stays on then it's good now see that yeah it's all good so that's uh six percent or dryer let's get it mounted on the lathe cleaned up and get some finish on them so this is another common problem that you're going to deal with if you uh want to do these bowls uh you introduce so much water that when they dry they tend to go really oval and so for instance this way is 2.77 and this way it's 2.82 so you know that's pretty darn close to a sixteenth of an inch that it's off this way it's almost virtually the same size it's kind of strange so two point two point nine one and two point eight two that shows how out of round these are so i'm going to mount these between centers again uh most of these have the marks from the live center this one i'll have to redo and i'm actually going to resize these tenons so that they're the same size so i don't have to keep changing jaws out on my chuck as far as millimeters are concerned so you got 71 what is it 71.7 that way 73.9 big difference so you know the chuck's really only going to be hitting the four jaw chuck is only going to be grabbing it in two spots which you don't want to do so we're gonna have to clean these up and make them round again and then we will finish so this is what i'm gonna use to as like a drive for these bowls so this just goes into my stronghold chuck and this is actually a an old sanding pad from a six six inch air powered sander and i just made an adapter for it i think i drilled a hole in it years ago and screwed it in and glued it to make sure that it doesn't move it just goes into the chuck like this and if you want to if you're working with bowls that you don't want to worry about getting marked up you could take a bunch of this router router padding and put it over this so that it doesn't scratch anything up it doesn't really matter because these bowls still have to be sanded so no big deal all right so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to show one of these don't worry i'm not going to make you watch all five um things to note when sanding you're gonna have some really really fine detail on the edge of these fractals and that's what really makes this a really cool thing um so if you sand too aggressively you're gonna lose a lot of this fine detail so i sanded this to 220 i'll sand it again at 220 then 320 and that's all i'm gonna do for sanding um you'll also see a brush that i use it's called drill brush i'll get it here in a second so this is it's called drill brush i'm not sure if there's a link in the description or not anyway if there isn't i'll try and put one in there for you this one it should be a lot bulbous than this like it should be a lot bigger than this so this one's wore out and i need to get a new one but anyway that's what i use to clean out all these main channels and this fine detail and along with that you have to use a brass brush as well here anyway let's get to it i should also mention that i'm going to be wearing a self-powered respirator and the dust collection is going to be on as well this is not probably anything you want to breathe in so make sure that you have adequate ventilation proper lung protection and if you can use your dust collector usually this drill brush works pretty good it will get i'll say 80 percent of the uh the charred material out of those out of those channel areas but this one is like i said it's it's pretty wore out it's actually considerably smaller than it normally is i show it on other videos you can probably see the difference there time for new one so here's the first real look at how oval these bowls have gone you got to keep your speed relatively low in order to make sure you don't miss any um points of the of the bowl because it's you know it's so out of round now uh but you know that's kind of the price you pay you're introducing a huge amount of heat and a lot of water and after wood turning is dry it certainly doesn't like to have water so that that kind of explains why it does what it does so keep the delay speed slow and uh it'll be just fine well there you go um you know i could i could put the finish on this on the lathe or i can do all these and do the finishing all at once and that's that's probably what i'm doing like off the lathe but i mean check that out it is just the coolest thing ever it's amazing what the electricity does to this fantastic anyway i've got four more to do and then i'll see you over the mention we'll put some finish on all right all of our bowls are done look at that pretty awesome stuff got some spalting action going on but the fractals freckles are the star of the show now if you haven't seen me do one of these videos um the when you put the finish on because you've used uh baking soda it tends to really darken the wood and as you can see i'm all finishing off the lathe here i've got this is actually mohawk salad bowl finish uh it's funny when somebody commented that uh it's a great product but it kind of looks like a blood bag so anyway i thought that was kind of funny anyway uh these work fantastic this finish has been in here for oh man i don't know how long it's been in here i want to say a couple of months and there's not a thing wrong with it so anyway i think that there's a link in the description for these let's check them out and all i'm going to do is just pour it into the bowl here these bowls will probably eat up a fair bit of this finish it's really important to seal up all of these um these burnt areas so i'll just leave this on here for a little while let it soak in and then wipe it off and then i'll put it in my clean room to dry overnight and uh it's going to take either three or four coats of this to seal up all these black areas and to make make it look like it's you know really nice that actually didn't darken it as much as the salad bowl finish by general finishes has in the past interesting should pour this into something else and do this but it's soaking it right up and these are really dry too so that's certainly gonna make the finish soak up a lot or make the wood soak up a lot of finish and i've got a bowl down below to catch all of the fluid that runs off of here still got mosquitoes tons of them so anyway there's one i do have some osmo gloss that has come in so i don't know when i'm going to show that i'm still working on the platter from last week the magenta platter uh it's right now it's got uh i think five coats of finish on it and it does seem to be improving so i'm hoping maybe just one more coat of the salad bowl finished by general finishes on it is going to actually work but i might try that later on here and we'll have a look at it so i mean there is quite a contrast in the wood and where the finish is and if you're wondering if you don't seal up these these black areas uh you will get it on your hands uh i don't think a wax would do it you got to go with something similar to this and you know most people are never going to use these for food related items at most maybe a you know a fruit bowl which you know really if you're putting oranges and apples in uh it's not going to matter really what kind of a finish you use on it polyurethane or whatever i wouldn't have an issue using the wood bowl finish from general finishes on something like this as well like i said these were never really intended to be made to be used for food especially foods that are liquidy like salads because you know it gets down in all these grooves and these ones aren't too bad you can clean these out but some of these uh the next one that i got coming up here are really deep and it'd be hard you know really clean properly so that's another consideration like the burn on this is really really deep this one was a little a little punky and just trying to show you here anyway it's really deep so you know you wouldn't want to use um use this for salads or anything like that and you know i i know that i've talked about maybe switching still kind of looking for a finish this mohawk stuff is great don't get me wrong but it's just it's a little finicky to work with for my liking so that's why i'm going to be looking at something else i'm really hoping that the osmo is going to work but it's quite thick we might have to actually use it in a total different way in odis oil there's all kinds of them out there i just don't think that odis is going to give me the shine that i want oh maybe my business will take a different direction maybe i'll i'll go in a different direction with finishes something that's easy to repair uh i'm not going to do waxes and i'm not going to do mineral oils i want something that's durable and it will last but you know it's also maybe nice to have something that's that's easy to repair as well which this shiny finish from mohawk and from solid soluble finish or wood bowl finish from general finishes they're not easy finishes to repair you can repair them and i actually on my website it tells you how to repair them but you know it's not something that's easy to repair so that's maybe another consideration that we can look at on the channel as well i should have poured that into a cup that took quite a bit of finish as well liking all the finish that was in there there's still some dry areas now it's absorbed it so much so we'll go back to the first one start wiping it out first coat is not real real a real big problem as far as runs are concerned and so what i mean by runs a lot of times the finish will sit in the fractals and then when you set it down to dry it will run out and leave a little run uh on the first coat that's not really that big of a deal you know the second and third fourth coat it certainly is so something to really watch for it is really hard to swap mosquitoes when your hands are covered in finish and believe it or not some of these will still be able to go on to the vacuum chuck to do the bottoms even though it's got this these um these fractals in it you still uh should be able to get a tooth on actually quite a few of these here there might be might be one that we may not be able to do anything with it is no big deal i just mount it between centers turn away the foot and then finish it's no big deal tall if you can't draw a good vacuum on it or strong enough to hold it this is probably the darkest of them now in the past i've done these on the lathe or i've done them on the bench here um i do find that maybe the you can probably get away with doing a second coat on the bench after that i like doing them on the lathe that way i can get a nice even coat on the on the bowl itself there we go anyway i'll see you tomorrow for the second coat all right so this is the second coat and i've decided to do it off the lathe um don't worry i'm not going to make you watch all this i just i'm going to do this the same way that i did it the first time and uh for these third and fourth coat if there's a fourth coat that's needed we'll be on lathe see you then so before i put the third coat on i'm going to use the 4-0 steel wheel here yes you could use the scotch brite pads here i find the red runs to be too aggressive the white ones to be not aggressive enough so that's why i like to use the floral steel wool uh just make sure you blow it up well and uh it'll be fine all right so this is the third coat and what i like to do is just rub it down in the grooves after this it's not you know once it gets three coats on here then you don't really have to worry about this black coming off it'll be sealed up i mean look see there's nothing on the rag now at all so do all these channels and then i it is important now not to put it on too heavy because you certainly can get runs and those are aggravating say the least so i don't know if three coats is going to do it for this or not now i don't wipe this coat off i leave it just like uh when i'm finishing normal bowls so i'll actually see at the end when we're doing the bottom so i do have some people that want to know about the um the vacuum chuck that i'm using here and the two and the four that i just showed uh i'm telling you that i'm pulling 24 inches of vacuum on this bowl even though it's got the fractals in there there's enough give in the seal that it will create a seal um so anyway this video is just getting too long i promise i will try to do it in the next video next one shouldn't be as long as this one so this is another method uh if you don't have a vacuum check this is probably the most likely way that you're going to remove the tenon from the base of your bowls i realize everybody doesn't have a vacuum chop so i thought i would show this this one i couldn't draw a vacuum on but four of the five i could draw enough vacuum that wasn't an issue and of course this is just i'm using a rather dull chisel here just to clean up the very bottom very center of it all right well that's it for the video i said i would do an update on the magenta platter and that's what i'm gonna do now before we look at our fractal burnt bowls so you know i was having issues with spots not or spots being sticky and the finish not hardening up and you know i wasn't exactly sure what to do with it here's the very base of the bowl or the platter i should say and still need one more coat on the bottom here and as you can see i'm just trying to get the light to hit that correctly there's no more dull spots in it now what did i do i used the tripoli buffing pad and i've actually pushed quite hard on it and i don't know if that um cured the resin at all or what the deal is with that i also used um methyl hydrate which is my denatured alcohol substitute right now to i could clean it well so any of those areas that were kind of uh sticky like that that's what i use i use the methyl hydrate to clean it um denatured alcohol same same idea but it's just so expensive up here in canada right now um still have a few streaks that i want to get so i want one more coat to go over here there are six coats on this now it took a couple of days for the finish to harden up on it and i don't know if that's just because it was reacting with the resin or what the deal is with that but anyway i've got it figured out and i think this is all it is so i'm just going to put one more coat on the entire piece i'm going to actually buff it with the tripoli and then put the seventh coat on and then it will be ready to go and it's already got a new home so what do i think the issue is uncured resin uncured stabilizing resin um there's been a couple of subscribers commented that they think that you know it wasn't in the oven long enough and you know i would probably tend to agree with that so next time that i'm doing any stabilizing like that i'm actually going to leave the pieces in the oven for probably about an hour and certainly you know between 200 and 250 uh and then i'll have a look at and see if if that really sorts it out i can't think of anything else why i would have an issue with that and never before so i think that that's certainly it so anyway i've got another one to do well actually i've got a whole bunch of other bucks on the world to do so maybe we can do another one and see if that corrects the issue all right so this week i lost a little look at these now it's thursday and then you know i'm running out of time again this bowl here all the bowls still have one more coat of finish to go on the base uh but i think this one and the other one is probably my favorite very very cool freckles i mean look at the fine look at the fine detail there i don't i don't even know if you could draw that on with a pen the detail is so fine so that's the first one this here's uh certainly another favorite really nice freckles in it nice and even of course these fractals are called lichtenberg figures is what these are called case you're curious number three totally awesome as well it's got some heavy uh fractal burns in it too but like i said in the video you never know what you're going to get now this one actually has some black ca glue filling in a couple of these three lines there and after the water was introduced we had another split here so that was filled in with thin ca glue uh of the five this is by far the softest one and um i couldn't um couldn't grab this one with the vacuum chuck anyway it's got really really deep freckles in it again you know you can't you can use these for function use them as like uh fruit bowls but you know i would never put a salad in something like this uh it's just too hard to clean to clean properly and this is the last one another pretty bowl too you just never know you never know you never know so um in closing broccoli burning is a very dangerous potentially life-taking uh thing you know it's something to be not fooled with if you don't know what you're doing um i know there's probably going to be some negativity towards this uh this video uh when i make these fractal burning videos i'm i'm trying to show people a way to do this safely human nature being what it is i know people are going to try this i did and you know what i did some research on youtube when i when i first looked into it and it was downright scary some of the stuff i was watching i know i know enough about electricity you know that it was just downright terrifying and i said there's got to be a better way there are there are like i like i said there's freckle burnt devices and as long as you can set them up where you're not holding the leads by all means uh use them uh i use a microwave transformer because i'm looking for the power i i do have a neon sign transformer that has i think it's 15 000 volts but has very low amperage and the amperage as best that i can tell is what makes these fractals so if you don't have that amperage you can't get those really wide fractals uh so you know i'd love to work with safer safer transformers but it's just not doing it for me so that's why i'm using the uh the microwave one so you know please please if you're gonna do this hands-free do not hold the leads when you're doing this please please anyway that's it i want to show one last thing this is my vacuum chuck so a lot of people are probably going to be wondering how how can i grab these bowls with the fractals well you know there's enough give in this seal it will form a seal around that um three of them i could pull 25 inches of vacuum and there was one that i could only pull 20. and that's fine as long as you're taking light cuts that should work fine and you remember i'm turning out board so if that's inboard you can bring up the tail stock for support and to keep that thing from flying off the only one that i had to turn between centers was the one with a really deep uh burning in it um 25 000 subscriber giveaway bowl this is what we're going with seemed to be a general consensus when i made this this of course is aluminum nuggets red uh red epoxy from designer or sorry pearl red from designer epoxy and of course aluminum nuts so this will be the 25 000 subscriber giveaway bowl as soon as i hit 25 000 subscribers i will ship this off to the winner worldwide and we're going to be picking from the comments so please comment i do answer every comment that comes in uh i may not get to it right away but eventually i will get all the comments um so that's it hopefully you enjoyed it uh don't forget about our sponsors in the description down below sandpaper.ca designer epoxy starboard adhesives and of course hunter tool systems they're in there all the details are down below and um i guess that's it till the next one take care stay safe and don't forget that bell you know when i put up new video see ya you

Channel: Sprague Woodturning

Views: 9,095

Rating: 4.9210157 out of 5

Keywords: fractal burning, lichtenberg figures, maple, petawawa, ottawa, ontario, made in canada, resin, woodturning, wood turning, woodworking, transformer

Id: kH-tiaudJpg

Length: 53min 6sec (3186 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 04 2021