Woodturning - The Pot of Gold Bowl

hi everybody welome to sprag wood turning my name is Jim if you haven't been here before this is predominantly a turning Channel where each week I show people how to make things on the lathe this week we are going to be working with some fantastic Maple and this is spalted maple got some really cool pencil line spalting in it and I have another piece to go with this and what we're going to do is combine designer epoxy's five new hypers shifts all in one batch it this thing should be so Shifty we won't even be able to hold onto it so that's what we're going to do this week uh first things first let's we need to cut these to size get them cleaned up and then um we'll get mixing some epoxy all right so this is the bucket that we're going to use uh there's a template that goes in the bottom of it like so uh this is another piece that I pulled from stock that I think will work I want you know the bottom of this you know I think the majority of this is going to be wood so all I'm going to do is take some Gorilla Tape here I could get out my circle cutting jig to do this but I think that this should work just fine stick this down on top of here and you know I'm trying to keep straight edges out of here I want natural edges so that's that's the main idea here if you haven't seen this before and then all I'm going to do is just trace this Oak Line with a black marker and then we'll be able to cut this on the band saw something like that we can fine-tune that afterwards so there's the outline on that one and I'm just going to leave that one on there and then we'll cut this on the banda as you're watching me cut up these pieces I'd like to personally thank you all for stopping in to watch this week's video uh working with spalted Maple is certainly one of my more favorite Woods to uh to work with uh the color variations the pencil line spaling that you don't get all the time but in certain pieces you certainly do is really really cool to work with and it really gives you a really unique look once we got these pieces cut of course we need to remove this bark and again this is predominent for the new people that watch are new to my channel and watching uh the video today uh it is important to remove any bark prior to doing any casting I'm going to take this over on the Belt Sander this has got anchor seal on the bottom of it so I want to get rid of that so so that I can glue this down inside the bucket uh then we'll go over to the lathe and brush all this stuff off must say though this is pretty light lots of dry rot in this another reason why it's important to remove anchor seal and if you're not familiar with what that is it's essentially a liquid wax that dries clear and that prevents moisture from leaving the wood too fast because that's how cracks happen so wood Turners we like to use this to slow down the release of moisture so that our pieces don't crack but of course you can't stick anything to it including epoxy so that's why it's important to remove it uh you know on the bottom it may not be so bad but on the side if you've got some Acer seal and the epoxy doesn't stick to it then a big piece of that could come off and hit you when you're on the lathe with it all right I should do let's get some resin mixed up since this is a deep por we need a deep casting epoxy so that's why we're going to be using deep casting epoxy from designer epoxy uh very important to mix your epoxy correctly get your ratios correct and of course uh if you're having issues with a curing could be a temperature thing as well now like I said earlier we're going to be using five of these hypers shifts in this one casting in the to be honest with the after I mixed them all together it was given me I don't know a copper gold kind of color and I wasn't really happy with that so you know I'm just putting a/4 teaspoon of each one of these in the mix and um in the end I have to alter the mix a little bit to bring it to kind of the color that I was hoping it would look like but uh I also had to use the mechanical mixer here because I there was a lot of pigments in there and I wanted to make sure that they're mixed in there thoroughly well all those colors together give us almost a copper color I'm not sure if I'm happy with that or not let's put a little bit more green red and grass green in it there that gives it a little bit of a more bronzy color I find anyway all right I'm expecting this is going to take two of these but let's find out yeah it's probably going to even take more than that anyway I'll bring it back when I'm ready all right here's next liter and a half I'm just going to mix up another 3/4 of a liter and I'll be right back here's 3/4 of a liter unfortunately we're probably going to have to add more than this I'm going to throw this in the vacuum chamber because uh there's lots of rotten Punky wood in this so I think that uh that would probably be a good practice to do that vacuum chamber is coming up next okay here we go still some confusion over why I use the vacuum chamber sometimes and other times I don't if these two pieces of w of wood were solid pieces of wood without any cracks all I would have done is threw the epoxy into the bucket and threw it into the pressure pot but unfortunately when you're working with spalted pieces of wood a lot of times they can have a lot of dry rod in them it's essentially nature is breaking down the wood which we want mother nature to do but of of course it gives us those nice nice colors and pencil lines so you know it's a it's a beautiful thing to work with but it's a difficult thing to work with so by essentially throwing this into the vacuum chamber it's going to draw all the air out of the wood and then when you release the vacuum since the wood is submerged in the epoxy it will draw that epoxy into the wood essentially stabilizing it's it's not true stabilizing but that's essentially what you're doing here now another example would be the Bop pods so when the seeds are removed out of those Bop pods they create voids and if that pod is on its side well air is going to get trapped up inside of those little void areas so by throwing those into the into the vacuum chamber you can draw that air of there and for the most part get rid of all of those bubbles so once this is done it will go into the pressure pot and the combination of vacuum chamber and the pressure pot will for the most part ensure that any of the soft wood soft Punky wood has been saturated by the epoxy and it'll make a nice strong casting to work with all right so there you go that is full vacuum uh what I cycle it off six times something like that I don't know if that stick is helping or not but hey any help is some help anyway I'm going to let this go for probably about another half hour and I'll bring you back when that's done all right that's been 45 minutes I'm just going to release the vacuum and get this in the pressure pot all right I'll take that stick out of there and we'll see you guys in there in 3 days oh that's heavy well good morning as you can see I actually tinted the uh the artcast before I put it in with the exact same mixture of pigments hopefully anyway it looks pretty similar all right let's get this out of here and get this on the late sorry to disappoint why does I tell you the colors are pretty spot on it's not much difference at all very happy with that all right let's get some centers so one thing to to note when that came out of the vacuum chamber it really did look bronzy like it is now it wasn't so much a gold or copper so I was happy with that uh even after throwing this in the vacuum chamber and the pressure pot on day two when I opened this up there was still um it had dropped off a/ inch in in height I'll take that so then I figured okay what I'm going to do is I'm going to I was just going to pour clear and sometimes I probably wouldn't bother with this but the fact that there was those big cracks if you remember in the big piece there was a really big cracks where those were exposed all the way to the top and I knew that if I didn't fill those in somehow that it was really going to be a problem so that's why I decided to do the second pour I don't know what happened to the footage from that um sometimes if the battery dies on the camera when you're filming it doesn't seem to record all of the footage and you lose it and I think that's what happened this time regardless we've got a nice solid casting and that is the important thing I should also mention that we are using the number three Hercules from Hunter tool systems and just like all of my sponsors check out the links in the description that will take you to their sites and by using my code inlay gem you'll get a discount on your purchase so just like always we're going to strip off all this excess epoxy and get down to basically raw wood and go from there figure out exactly what we're going to do in the end because you've seen the thumbnail I did decide to turn this into a bowl uh haven't really done other than the three cores that that I did last week um haven't really done a whole lot of bowls recently so I I thought that this was a good candidate I also initially thought that um this would have made a really cool Hol offor and it certainly would have as well but um I was looking for a different Bowl shape so that's what what I decided to go with this week uh there is just some all that pencil line spalting in this piece is absolutely amazing and when it's combined with the epoxy you'll see it coming up here that you know it it just gives it all that light wood is now dark and uh it's almost like a black on black effect very cool look there you go uh the color variations within this I think is what really makes this piece uh the spalting uh the dark and light areas I really really like this piece so much going on still some areas where it needed to be removed so that's what I was pointing to there I'll briefly talk about last week's video and if you missed that I will link it at the end of this video but essentially I took three cores and did them three different ways I made a box or say a Litt it dish a ring bowl and just a straight bowl from from three different cores so I if you miss that I will link that at the end of this video and thanks to those who did watch it last week I really do appreciate it so we're still working down through this exposing essentially that wood on the top I typically don't like that ghosting that you see on you know if the resin is sitting on top of the wood so in most cases I will always get rid of that that's just me I know that some people will leave it behind but it's just I don't usually like the look of it so that's why you'll see me Whittle these pieces down this this could have been you know maybe about a/ inch taller is really all we're losing off of the the overall size of this and uh yeah if you you know it kind of looks like some sort of swamp monster at the at the lathe with stuff hanging off my helmet uh a lot of people are asking what I'm wearing for self-powered respirator and that is the power cap from JSP that's uh that's what I'm wearing and uh so far so good I I don't even know how long I've had this now 6 months I I did find that the button that's on the battery does seem to have a hole in it now for whatever reason so I'm thinking about contacting Peak safety because I don't think that that should be there already but other than that um it's been a good purchase and I like the fact that it's a lot lighter than the trend that I was using prior to it so you can see the epoxy has really penetrated this piece uh still lots of pencil line spalting here absolutely love penccil line SP faulting and if you're wondering why it's like this uh essentially the uh the spalting is a fungus and it seals off parts of the wood from competing fungi so that's why you get these pencil lines uh anyway it's called pencil line spalting here's a really good example of it there and that's why it didn't penetrate into this portion of the uh of the casting it's a really cool thing and uh I mean you just never know what you're going to get when you cut these things open little fainter here but still very nice this is going to be some really nice chatoyant right here big hole down in there I don't know how far that goes but it goes in quite a ways um you know in order to maximize this spalting here I think that we're just going to do a simple rounded off form I've already started here uh this will the center of this will be the high point and we'll just round this off I might even make it into an enclosed Bowl I'm not really sure yet or Hollow form but uh first thing we got to do is reverse this and get it cleaned up and get a glue block on the bottom and uh then we can figure all the other stuff out the um I can see all kinds of color variations within this too those five hypers shifts are really coming through little bit of wood or a little bit of resin to remove from here yet but uh you can definitely see it and of course these thermal Pockets that you see here to create all of this really neat uh designs that you get with the with the epoxy is really cool too all right uh yeah let's get this reversed bottom cleaned off and then glue block so that was in the moment and uh as you seen by the thumbnail I didn't really go in that direction uh as I was working this piece uh the the form kind of developed as I was working on it and eventually abandoned the idea of making like an enclosed Bowl uh that certainly would have looked nice as well but this profile was something that we hadn't done before so well we had have done maybe one or two pieces that might be similar to it but the the CES on this piece near the top I think really add to it and I'll just mention that that is an ingrain hard maple waste block that I'm gluing on there with high temperature Hot Melt glue from an electric frying pan so I got lots of volume this will become a problem I don't want to spoil it for you but this will become a problem and um I'll basically have to change gears on what I'm doing later on uh one thing when you're on the lathe and you're working with stuff like this you have to be flexible uh it's not always going to go your way as you've probably seen here a number of times on this channel uh rarely do you have a piece that maybe doesn't present some sort of a challenge to you so you have to be able to adapt to those things and uh and a way push through them as we used to say in the Army but uh anyway I like this piece and hopefully you guys do in the end as well so here is your weekly house update selling house update I'll add to this and if you're new and this is the first video you've ever watched um my wife and I are selling our current home and moving to the east coast of Canada building a new house in a much larger workshop on family land and um well there's nothing to report it's still extremely slow we haven't had any showings we uh We've relisted the house and we're going to update the pitchers because we have winter pitchers uh for the house and so that's not really so great when you're trying to sell a house so we're going to do new summer pictures along with that we've also hired a Stager so she's going to help us out I don't think there's a ton of work to do here because my wife and I have done a lot of putting stuff away and decluttering uh but you know she's already given us a few suggestions and we've done that and um so anyway she'll come in and uh she'll work her magic and um you know we'll update the pictures and hopefully uh things pick up cuz it's you know it's still very slow uh still very early for House Hunters to be in that are being posted to uh the base here and um so anyway that's that's all there is there's nothing much more to it than that we're still in a holding pattern waiting for an offer to come I do I do make this foot a little bit smaller but not much smaller than what it is now and again those those color variations are just I don't know it's like a Dalmation Bowl almost uh here's where you know I was my intention was I was going here I was going to okay I'm going to close this bowl in a little bit and then I got looking at it and I said you know might be kind of neat to have a little Cove at the top of this uh that way there is a bit of a witness line I'd be able to disguise it in there and to be perfectly honest with you the only reason you know that there's one there is because I've told you uh but for the most part it disappears when I do make this Cove and you know again it's just max Flex on the lathe uh look at something and you know shut the lathe off regularly and you know it'll appear to you and you're like yeah that's it that looks really nice let's go with that all right we are all set up and ready for coring this is the oneway coring setup from oneway.cab the number one knife set in to do this and of course the co-pro cutter this is going to eat this stuff up unfortunately well I've got John Tully's tail stock Extender on here but I don't think we're going to be able to use it if you look down here the rig is over quite a way so this is going to have to go in quite a distance before we're going to be able to get any tail stock support so let's hope nothing bad happens until we can or we get the core out of here so you'll see that there's already a groove cut uh remember when I was saying when the battery dies the footage was lost well when I first attempted to do this uh the glue block snapped off the bottom the casting cleanly and all it was was just glue between the casting and the joint I was having a real hard time getting a good solid bite on that hard maple I think what I'm going to do is switch to Birch because Birch should be able to get a better bite on it in the future uh anyway this is the second attempted coring this and it isn't going well all right this ain't going to happen uh it keeps coming loosen the Chuck this is going to get ripped off of here and it's going to get smashed so uh you know what I'm just going to drill down through the center of this move it outboard and then carry on with uh cleaning out the inside uh I want to save this core but it isn't worth destroying this piece to get it so I don't know if you're picking up the frustration in my voice I typically don't let these things get to me cuz I I just know that this is just sometimes the way that it is I just I just accept the fact that you know uh every day is going to be a Monday some days but uh this actually was a Monday and the way that I typically like to start my my videos is no later than Monday because of the multiple coats of finish that I put on these pieces so you know I need to start these I basically have to have the piece and what's first going to finish on Monday and uh uh because Tuesday be the second coat Wednesday be the third coat if it's needed and then of course you shoot the ooto on Thursday so you know uh at this stage we're starting to get late in the day Monday and i' probably been at this for a good solid 6 hours and I knew that I still had quite a ways to go here uh with the epoxy that had penetrated this wood it was extremely difficult to cut it was actually rock solid uh uh more than usual which is kind of funny so anyway once this was drilled out I switched it out board so we're just cleaning up the outside of this because of course every time you take it out of the Chuck and put it back in the Chuck then you know it's it's not going to be running true typically sometimes you might get lucky sometimes it will but in most cases it won't and then um I proceeded to whittle out the rest of this on the inside it's too bad because this would have been a nice core but you know you you just got to really kind of look at the economics of it if this thing comes off the lathe and hits the floor then you know you may have lost a substantial amount of money instead of you know $1 to $150 core that's in the center of this so that's kind of the way I approach these things uh again I'm a firm believer that something will tell you if it wants to be created or not um in the when I was when I was a mechanic in the Army we had if you worked on a vehicle and it you know it just had all kinds of problems and it just seemed to never quit and we used to call them Hangar Queens I don't know I don't know why we call them that but that's what they were called and they were just sit around the workshop and it would just be a fix something and then it would grot and then it would come back with a total different related problem and you know the thing would just fight you every step of the way and that's kind of where this was going with this really the only way that I might have been able to get this car out and I you know I probably would have been successful would have been to set up the steady rest and go through all of that uh but you know it's like I said I I was running out of time but in reality the it took so long to get the inside of this out that it probably would have been in my benefit to set up the stady rest take the Coro and uh then move it over board and finish it off uh the other problem with the fact that this is so deep compared to its width is there still would have been about 2 in of material left in the base of the bowl because you can't move the coring rig base in far enough to get down to your 1/ in wall thickness uh I really really would like to see somebody develop some sort of a steady rest to deal or not a steady rest a tail stock support somehow to hold these castings uh to make life a lot easier when you're working on these small diameter castings uh if this is 12 in in diameter it's not a problem because the rig will be more to the left and then you can bring up tail stock support and you know this this is not an issue but uh if you don't have that wide casting then of course you're forced to use the smaller coring rig and or coring knife set and uh well it just sometimes doesn't work and you've seen that here a number of times on this channel that it did didn't work uh anyway it was um max Flex when you're a wood turner because uh you're going to need it you're going to need it another thing that was not typical uh most of the time when I'm working with pieces like this is that I'm using the Hercules well above Center I was having issues U cutting it cleanly and once I started using the cutter well above Center like you see me using it here it seemed to cut better and I'm not exactly sure why that is it could be the fact that the majority of this is ingrain uh regardless we get it eventually um and we're you know I don't want to spoil it we're but we're not done yet we're not done yet that's the 3 and 1/2 in diple disc from sandpaper. CA again the link is in the description to get some fantastic I absolutely love these nipple discs and this piece was sanded from 60 to 180 we do encounter some issues with sanding that we'll have to deal with but overall the sanding went fairly well not too many issues all righty this is 3 oz of the pro series L silicone barbecue brush now I could dump this epoxy into this bowl and then use my hand to smooth it out I prefer to use a brush because you can basically control how much you're putting on cuz if you put on too much of this of this epoxy it can be quite messy well what do you think really like this little detail like how this is swept in a bit it's almost like a pot of gold maybe that's what we'll call this piece uh you know to be honest with you I see different different types of hypers shift I look down on it here but I don't see it so much you've got to be looking at it at an angle in order to see much difference I mean it definitely is kind of bronzy gold dominate it that's for sure uh one of the things that I absolutely really like about this piece is the wood and the resin staining in it just gives it so much character crazy looking stuff this one here is pretty much all penetrated by the epoxy now there is one area that's a problem and it's right here and that's where the wood was softer or more rotten than the wood around it so it's indented a little bit so what I will probably do tomorrow is trim that now that this has an epoxy coat in it it's it's hopefully absorbed a lot of that and hardened that grein so then I'll trim that back tomorrow that's the plan I might leave it but I'll probably trim it back and then um carry on with sanding anyway let me know in the comments what you think especially the profile see you tomorrow well good morning this is what we're looking at this is that area right there that's the problem that light spot uh if I had to guess I'd say it's in oh easily an eighth so you know I could just trim this area uh but I think that it's probably best if I just give the whole inside of trimming and um the good thing about this epoxy coat was there was some cracks down in here those are all filled in now so that's great but um if I only Trim in one area and then sand then I think that there's going to be an issue as far as the way that when the water locks goes on what's it's going to look like so that's why that's why I'm doing it that way but uh you know there's some dry spots ironically wherever there's an issue with dry spots that's that really soft Punky grain and that's another reason to uh do an epoxy coat so even after using the vacuum chamber and then the pressure plot deep down inside of this casting there were still pieces of or areas of it that still needed more stabilizing uh this is not uncommon when you're working with pieces like this uh like I said earlier if you're working with solid pieces of wood I think that you could probably just put the epoxy into this piece set it on the bench and you wouldn't need anything else but you know I I do find that pieces like this visually are stunning and a lot better than just straight solid wood pieces uh but again you don't need a pressure pot or a vacuum chamber to do this type will work but it certainly uh will Aid you in making really nice castings so that's why I recommend getting at least a vacuum chamber when you're working with uh epoxies like this or difficult pieces of wood I decided to trim the outside initially wasn't going to but I decided to trim the outside and I'm just taking the starbon thin here and putting it on those areas and I was really encouraged to see that it wasn't really soaking into the wood if it it was soaking into the wood then I that I knew that the epoxy really probably hadn't have done its job so you know I was encouraged by that and uh anyway once this is all trimmed up again it'll be sanded from 60 to 800 and then you know like I usually do I'll use the Triple E buffing compound from the be buffing system and um use the dag alcohol after that to clean this piece prior to its first coat of waterl I it's has been a chore getting here but you know it was I think that is definitely worth the work because this I think is a visually stunning piece and hopefully you guys enjoy it as well uh it was just you know um a little frustrating to work on that's all but sometimes the best pieces are the most frustrating pieces that you've worked on that's really a thing all right this is the first coat of waterlux gloss all righty there it is there definitely we'll need another coat maybe even uh two coats just love the different color variations within that piece of wood it's really cool and of course the hypers shift see if we can get it shift you see that the since we're so aggressive on the tool work and the sanding that yeah we're definitely going to need at least one more coat before it'll be ready to be uh to have the foot done everyway let me know in the comments you think if there is another coat well there will be another coat I'll do it the same way as this one and we'll see you when we're doing the bottom all I'm showing there is how the clamping pressure from the Chuck I I'm still a little baffled that it that it got pulled out of there twice uh parts of that are almost kind of squared off so you know the Chuck had a really good bite on this Tenon but it just I don't know just one of those things that it just did not want to cooperate so we're just going to use the 58 bull gouge here from David Ellsworth to get rid of the majority of this and then you'll see me switch out to the Hercules to finish it off and of course on the bottom of this piece it was sanded from 80 to 400 I didn't really see the need to go any higher than that and I also did some engraving on the bottom of this too it's so busy that I figured I would do that instead of trying to write my signature on there all right well that's going to do for the video uh special thanks to everybody that has watched the video all the way through I really do appreciate it and thanks again to the membership you guys are awesome um yeah let's have a last little chat about this week's project hope you guys enjoyed it well what do you think about this week's project cannot go wrong with spalton Maple you know as I said in the video it certainly is not an easy thing to work with can be if you catch it soon enough then it's not a problem but a lot of times uh if you let if you want some really nice bolting like there is in this then you're going to have to let your log sit around for a longer time and then of course you're kind of battling the bugs and you're battling Mother Nature so you know it's um when I would get logs I would seal them and set them outside for a year I would check them after a year year and a half usually is what it took and uh but of course it's you know who's going to get to it first you or the bugs and so anyway uh it's nice to uh be able to show you a really nice piece of pencil Line spalted Maple here is the bottom and as per normal he needs uh the Finish apply because I'm out time uh let me see dimensions on this are 8 and 1 12 inches across and it's about 5 in tall and it's probably around a/ in wall thickness there abouts and I should mention that this piece is for sale if you're interested send me an email to sprag woodturning gmail.com and I will disclose the price then in case this is a gift anyway I think this is really beautiful really like this detail where it's swept in and then the Cove above and you know it just goes to show like I I was on the lathe and I was like yeah I'm going to turn this into closed in Hall form or closed in bowl and so we would have lost this detail and I think that that would have looked well looked good as well but uh I just think that this little detail at the top really sets this piece off anyway let me know don't forget to put designer epoxy in the comments down below to be entering into the next 3 gallon giveaway at 130,000 when we get there and speaking of designer epoxy uh they have a sale starting today until the uh till the 12th for the Mother's Day sale and it's uh it's only on the Deep cast so 3 Gall kit of Deep cast and this is a fantastic price is 209 Canadian and that's 182 us their boats and along with that you're going to get a free mixer and a a free 3oz jar of pigments the Pearl pigments uh random colors that they'll put in with your order so that's a great great price if you've been waiting to try desire box now is the time and during this sale of course my code won't work because that's a better deal than what you'll get with my code along with that don't forget about our sponsors in the description down below if you need some stuff head on down there and put some money back in your pocket next week we are going to be doing another hypers shift project uh this here really I when I first seen the the three pigments it should have in the back of my mind I should have said okay this is going to be a gold goldish bronze type uh pigment but I just I don't know I never really thought about it and so anyway I'm just going to use one pigment next week and uh I'm also going to be working with a species of wood that I've never worked with well very very little because don't see a lot of it around here so anyway that will be next week all right thanks for watching the video I really do appreciate it take care stay safe don't forget the Bell please share my videos with your friends that is the large way for me to build my presence here on YouTube I would greatly greatly appreciate that and have yourself a fantastic weekend and happy Mother's Day to all the mothers out there see you next week [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Sprague Woodturning

Views: 26,397

Keywords: woodturning, wood turning, epoxy, resin casting, spalted maple, hunter tool systems, starbond, sandpaper.ca, designer epoxy, resin, resin art, ontario

Id: YBtYyI-KI_c

Length: 43min 42sec (2622 seconds)

Published: Fri May 10 2024