Cherry Project – Day 2

A comment to begin … this is without a doubt the hardest cherry wood I have ever turned. These bowls are “roughed out” – that means that wood will be turned away from both the inner and outer surfaces after they dry, and decoration can be added near the rim of the bowl. So, because the tool was bouncing on the surface of the bowl you may see significant chatter and ridging in the turned surface – this will be turned away when the bowl is finish-turned, several months in the future.

Today was more of the same, except we began the day with two problematic bowl blanks.

The first bowl today was problematic because of a deep pith-crack which branched down into the wood.

We chiseled a lot of it out so we could contact solid wood with the spur drive.

We shaped the back and then turned it around and cut away a lot of material until we eliminated any cracking (we hope).

I wasn’t sure we would be able to get an inner (cored) bowl from this piece but we got a nicely shaped and reasonably sized bowl from inside the larger one.

Both the shot above and the shot below suffer from a wonky camera angle. The rim (above) is not nearly this thick in relation to the diameter of the bowl, and the end of the yardstick (below) is actually even with the edge of the bowl. So, we were able to get a 12+ inch outer bowl and a 9-inch inner bowl from this blank.

The second bowl was problematic, first because it was not symmetrical – it had a large lump on one side of the center which needed to be turned away to bring the bowl into balance.

Second, the lump that needed to be turned away concealed some wild grain – almost worthy of being called a burl. However, like many burls, there were cracks in the grain.

I did not core this bowl blank because of those cracks on the exterior of the bowl. I was afraid that coring would put enough pressure on the wood to crack out the entire side.

Unfortunately, the cracks go all the way into the inside of the bowl. We won’t know whether this bowl will be viable or not until it dries down a ways. We may be able to epoxy the cracks.

The remainder of the bowls were more or less unremarkable – today we ended up with a total of eight bowls from the five remaining half-rounds.

Here are individual pictures of the roughed out bowls from today, in no particular order. Some will have no comments. The bowl below is pretty good, but we will keep an eye on the knot in the side of it.

The next bowl is the inner bowl from the one above – it too has a knot or two in the side which may affect its viability when it comes time to finish turn the bowl.

Another bowl with a couple knots in it (below).

The bowl below was the core from a larger bowl – it has a spot on the rim that we hope does not lead to a crack as it dries.

The bowl below looks good with not evident flaws and some nice grain patterns.

The bowl below is the core from the bowl above – a bit smaller than some of the other cores, but a nice little bowl with no obvious flaws.

The last bowl I turned this afternoon I did not core – I turned away a lot of rotting sap wood and it ended up much smaller than the original bowl blank.

The last two picture show the pile of shavings behind and below the lathe. About one-fourth of these were there before I started this project.