Today’s first job was to finish turn the underside of a small burr oak bowl using my homemade bowl reversing chuck jaws. Then I put the first coat of oil on it and also on the pearwood bowls I made a day or two back. They soaked up quite a lot, and now look really promising. I think they will finish well.
But the day’s main job was turning a sycamore bowl. This is a large bowl from Kennington timber. I wrote before about this wood, that I originally thought was maple, and making a bowl from it. The latest bowl is bigger and has a lot of colour and some crotch figure. Here is the seasoned rough-out mounted on the Graduate lathe ready for finish turning. A little of the colour shows through the dry surface.
The spalting in this wood has made it a little porous and it needed quite a lot of care to deal with small areas of torn grain. It absorbed a large amount of finishing oil, but this fills the pores and seals the wood as well as bringing out the colour. There is more work to do, but this bowl already looks spectacular and will be a splendid fruit bowl.
Here is Izzie, my workshop assistant. She often comes into the studio to see what is happening, but does tend to fall asleep so I have found a bed for her. She is our lilac point Siamese, now just over a year old.
