Bowls / Colouring / Woodturning / Woodworking — 1 comment
04
May 21

Cosmic splatter

So I wanted to try turning a nice royal blue bowl with white liming wax. Picked out a chestnut blank, and roughed out the shape, and discovered it had an odd yellow discolouration in the wood that I’d not seen before. Rather unattractive too, not a nice shade of yellow (think bile, not sunshine). And when I stained it…

That’s not the richest of royal blues and it’s going green in places. I tried sanding back and applying a few more layers of stain:

but…

Just not nice. No deep colour, the endgrain’s popping but the rest of the bowl’s not right.
So, if at first you don’t succeed, drop the plan and do something different 😀

Ebonising lacquer all over the bowl (and my wall, my chest drill, me and a bit of the roof. Doh). Two coats of this in fact.

And then the point of this – out with the pearlescent acrylic paints (by Amsterdam in case anyone’s wondering). Dab a bit on the surface, then blow around with an airbrush until you get a very thin layer and a nice abstract pattern. There’s a trend of this in woodturning at the moment – look for “Cosmic Clouds” on youtube and you’ll find it – but I did try to apply the paint with the airbrush as well and I hadn’t thinned it correctly so I got spatter when I tried that first. Not great. Lots of airbrush cleaning followed. I do have some iridescent paints (not the Jo Sonia ones that everyone on youtube is using because those are a bit spendy over here right now, but Pebeo Studio ones) that I must try this with as well, but for now, just pearlescent.

Left to dry for a day or two and the white lines vanish away and the paint’s colours get more pronounced, albeit slightly.

So I figured I’d hollow it out and finish it. It had Opinions on this idea…

The entire tenon snapped clean off when I started hollowing. I hadn’t even had a catch, just some chatter:

Possibly not the best chunk of wood in the storage box. I was able to remount it on the screw drive and turn a small recess in the remains of the foot then grip it with some expanding jaws:

And I was able to mostly hollow it out that way with small cuts, but it’s not exactly as thin-walled as the last bowl. But it’s a test piece using possibly not-so-good timber, so I’m okay with that.

Reversed it and fixed up the foot on the push-plate, and gave it a coat or two of acrylic lacquer along the way as well. Doesn’t look too terrible in the sunshine. Must do another one of these again, maybe with a better piece of timber next time. And the iridescent paints. Or a mix of the two…

Bowls / Woodturning / Woodworking — 2 comments
03
May 21

Thin walls

So I’d been working on the shape of the bowls I was turning and trying to get the basics down, and a friend who’s been turning a lot longer than I have (hi Tom!) suggested a skill test – turn a thin-walled bowl. I managed to do that on two of my first bowls but I’d not turned anything with thin walls since.

So, trying again a year later with a small chestnut blank.

Nice simple open shape for this, no closed bowls or hollow forms just yet 😀

Using a tenon below the foot because the blank just seemed a few millimetres thick.

Sanded, oiled (just a coat of danish oil), yorkshire grit and hampshire sheen wax. Not doing anything very special because at this point, I expect it to explode mid-hollowing 😀

Reverse it into the chuck, face it off.

And now it gets hairy. Tom’s advised technique was to hollow out the top centimetre to the desired thickness, make all my finishing cuts for that centimeter, then do the next centimetre down (instead of roughly hollowing the whole bowl and then doing a finishing cut, because the bowl would be so thin that it would flex on the lathe, and the risk of a catastrophic catch gets much much higher.

First cm went okay…

Second cm was okay, starting to get stressed….

Third cm down, now just dreading a catch out of nowhere and a ruined bowl. Squeaky bum time. One last cm to go…

And it didn’t explode and I’m rather surprised to be honest. There are tool marks to remove and two high ridges (the pencil lines there mark them) to take care of:

And that’s ready for sanding.

Just over 2mm before sanding at the rim. And the depth was okay as well.

Sanded with poppyseed oil to 320 inside the bowl and hampshire wax to make it look nice:

And then reverse it again and use a push-plate to remove the tenon and shape the foot.

I can’t really get in any further than that even with my finest detail gouge so I carve off the little stub with a chisel.

And a bit of sanding and branding…

And that’s that. One skill test, done. I’ll have to keep practicing this, and a bit more regularly. But it’s nice to know I can do it at all…

Bowls / Woodturning / Woodworking — Leave a comment
16
Apr 21

Damn dinosaurs

Was watching Conkers Live this week and Stewart Furini was demonstrating spiralling and texturing (something I’d like to have tooling to do more of…) but at one point during the demo, he’d finished some spiralling and had painted and sanded back the piece and this was the result:

It was quite striking at the time and reminded me of something and it took a few minutes to place it:

I don’t have a spiralling tool but I do have carving tools. So I grabbed a blank…

It’s an odd shape, you’re looking at the bottom of the bowl here – I wanted it to fit my hand and to be a little closed over (turned out, it’s a lot closed over). Printed out the scratch marks from a jpg on the web…

Cut those out with a sharp knife, then put cellotape over the sheet and stuck it to the blank, then cut along the edges of the scratches through the cellotape and tidied up afterwards.

Then out with the v-tool gouges and a 5mm straight chisel and the sharp knife and I carved out the scratches.

Next up, ebonising lacquer.

Might have overdone that a little 😀 Worse, didn’t seal the wood first, so after sanding back…

That bleeding of the lacquer couldn’t be sanded away, it’s in there too deeply. In the end, I had to take the gouge to it again, cut the surface back by a millimeter or so, re-sand to 180, re-carve the scratches and then seal the surface and gave the area round the scratches two more coats of sealer, then masked off the area and ebonising lacquer again:

And then sanded back and this time it didn’t look bad so I hollowed it out (and going by the screaming noises I either need to get better tools for this or just get gud scrub), then flipped it over and used the push plate to tidy up the foot. Few coats of danish oil, some yorkshire grit and then a final coat of hampshire sheen wax got added along the way.

I kinda like it 😀

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