12 Inch Walnut Bowl.

At one of the club meetings I received a slab of walnut. First, I made an eight-inch bowl and added a maple bottom that I made into legs. That was published on 7 April on this site. That left me with a larger section of the slab. Below is a twelve-inch walnut bowl made from that section of the slab. On one edge there was a section of branch wood and I filled it with two-part epoxy so the lip would be smooth after using CA glue to stabilize it. 

Archie Patterson

This is the top view of the 12-inch walnut bowl. 

 

This is the bottom view of the 12-inch walnut bowl.

 

This the oblique view showing the area that had some fill added.  Height is about 3 inches.

 This section of the walnut slab has some great grain and color.   In the center of the wood is the edge of a small hole.  It does not look like a worm hole but where a twig once grew. My wife does not like me to fill these in as she feels it ads character.  There are two more small holes visible on the bottom as well.  Because my back does not let me work for more than a couple of hours at a time, I notice the shape changed some after each break.

 

 

Walnut Bowl with Maple Base

 Spring Project

After a winter of colds and not feeling like I wanted to do anything I wanted a project to get back into turning.  My wife said a lot of my bowls were too small to be useful.   I had a slab of Walnut I got from one of the club's Bring Back sessions so I cut off a section to make an eight-inch bowl.  First, I ran the cut off slab thru a planner to get a smooth flat place to glue a mounting block to and then found the center for an eight-inch bowl and glued on the mounting block.  Once I turned the base, I turned the work around and turned the inside using a chuck.  I used three different Forstner bits to start the hollowing process.  Below is the finished product.

Walnut bowl.  Note the grain pattern on the inside of the bowl.

 

Added maple section over the top of the walnut mounting block. 

 

I mounted the mouth of the bowl in rubber jaws and turned the bottom of the mounting base to about 2.5 inches.   I then made a maple section to fit over the mounting base.  It looked like a cup and fit that over the mounting base.  Once glued in place I turned the maple to reveal the mounting block in the center.  I positioned the chuck so I could turn the work 90 degrees and lock it in place, and used a sanding drum on a drill extension so I could cut each of the curved sections in the  maple base.   This gives the effect of it having four legs.  After a coat of shellack, I added three coats of wipe-on-polly.   The inside was done while the work was still in the chuck.  For the outside, I mounted the work against a friction plate using a section of wood cut to fit in the base to push the work into the plate and center it.  This allowed me to apply the finish away from the lathe and once dried remount the work and run steelwool over it between coats.