Power carved bowl

[Gixxerjoe04]

Quick journal since there isn’t a project showcase anymore haha.  Even though I have a lathe and turn a lot, wanted to try something new, power carving a bowl.  Ordered an arbortech mini turbo plane and their sanding attachment for my grinder, which I bought at the glorious harbor freight.  Instead of trying on crap wood first, went for it using a Concinnia burl from Australia.  The challenge with doing these are figuring out how to secure the piece, there’s a jawhorse thing you could buy which would make life easier but for like $150, so I used some wood and clamps on my outfeed table which worked fine.  Probably wasn’t smart to do it in my shop because it’s a dusty mess.  It’s pretty straight forward, just start grinding away, stopping to check the thickness so you don’t ruin it.  The mini plane leaves some tear out that would take awhile trying to sand out so I got a medium grit wheel from King Arthur, it was nice because it was easier to control and leveled out areas a lot easier but the turbo plane is good for bulk removal.  Then comes the fun part, sanding for a long time.  The arbortech sander is nice but didn’t do great with cleaning with the real rough spots, used my regular sander for that but then their sander for the higher grits.  The major complaint with their sander is the sanding discs are not velcro, so changing them sucks because once used, they aren’t really sticky enough to use again, might glue on some Velcro to it for the future.  This burl had hidden cracks inside, I might have been able to grind them away since they didn’t go all the way through but didn’t want to risk blowing through the bottom.  So, using ca glue and crushed turquoise, filled them up and sanded some more.  For the finish I used high gloss tungoil varnish, formbys or whatever it’s called.  Might go back and flatten a spot on the bottom so it sits better but gotta find time for that.  Still happy the way it turned out, went on splurged on quite a few more burls to make some more.  Some of my pics wouldn’t load but you get the idea haha.

 

 

[..Kev]

That turned out pretty cool!  Nice touch on the fills!

[wdwerker]

Very cool Joe ! Kinda looks like a giant oyster shell.  Put it out with those little oyster crackers in it and see if anyone makes the connection. 

[Gixxerjoe04]

Fresh out of oyster crackers at my house, maybe when it's winter and chili time I'll restock haha.

[pkinneb]

That's awesome! I actually thought you blew through the bottom at first then went back and read the write up, very cool detail filling the cracks.

[Chestnut]

This is awesome. So a sculpted rocker is next? I agree it looks like an oyster shell. It was the first thing that i saw when looking at the pictures.

I remember watching an AVE review of the HF grinder and he gave it good remarks for how cheap it was. I have one my self and have used it all of once.

 

[Gixxerjoe04]

4 minutes ago, Chestnut said:

This is awesome. So a sculpted rocker is next? I agree it looks like an oyster shell. It was the first thing that i saw when looking at the pictures.

I remember watching an AVE review of the HF grinder and he gave it good remarks for how cheap it was. I have one my self and have used it all of once.

 

I bought that project when it was on sale, I'll tackle it one day haha.

[Chet]

I really like that Joe and I am with others, when I looked at the first picture of the finished bowl I thought "sea shell" looking.

If you get into this and decide to graduate to another grinder, the Milwaukee cordless is a pretty nice unit.  It was given to me as a gift and I have only used it about four times but it seems to have good balance and if you are moving around a bigger piece you are not having to dance with the cord.

[Chestnut]

2 hours ago, Chet said:

I really like that Joe and I am with others, when I looked at the first picture of the finished bowl I thought "sea shell" looking.

If you get into this and decide to graduate to another grinder, the Milwaukee cordless is a pretty nice unit.  It was given to me as a gift and I have only used it about four times but it seems to have good balance and if you are moving around a bigger piece you are not having to dance with the cord.

Not saying this is a bad idea cordless grinders are probably great. I do know Marc mentioned this in the guild project that if he didn't have a lot of batteries to swap around the cordless grinder would have taken considerably longer just because it drains the batteries fairly quickly. That was also a while ago when the battery tech isn't what it was today. Or was it Paul that commented on that when he did bar stools .... Man i'm only 30 and i'm already loosing my memory.

[Chet]

This is a good point.  It does pay to keep your tool choices branded together if you can, then you most likely have enough batteries laying around.