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.