Woodturning – A Large Maple Bowl

I spent some time at Roni’s recently. You may remember that it was her that introduced me to woodturning. I was asked me to make a couple of large bowls while I was there. My lathe is restricted to bowls that are 10″ in diameter or less. 2 of Roni’s lathes will handle larger diameters.

Finding a woodturning blank.

With that in mind she helped me find some beautifully marked maple for me to turn. It was part of a local tree that had comedown. Roni had planked it. In othere words, taken slices off the trunk that were about 4″ wide and a few feet long.

As you can see it was beautifully marked and as we scribed out a 15″ circle ready for sawing the blank I was already wondering whether I could do it justice. It was then cut out on Roni’s very large bandsaw. It stands over 6′ tall with a table that is over 4′ across and the saw blade has to be more than 10′ in circumerfence! There are no photos of the woodturning blank being cut out as it took both of us to manouvre the plank.

Frome there it was the usual woodturning process as you can see from this gallery;

The lathe is firmy bolted to the floor because even such a big machine (you can read about the lathe here) would vibrate with a large woodturning blank mounted on it. tMy smaller lathe does have a tendancy to bounce when an uneven blank is mounted on it. Bearing in mind that my lathe is bolted to the bench and the whole thing bounces together it is quite daunting to approach a vibrating lathe with a razor sharp gouge in your hand……

Back to the Maple Bowl

The wood turning process took a few hours and you can see the progress in the gallery. To say that I eas pleased with the outcome is an understatement! When I brought it home I used Hampshire Sheen high gloss wax (very expensive, but very good) to give it a deep and glorious shine.

The finished bowl is 15″ wide with a depth of about 4″. It is, without doubt, my largest, and easily the most beautiful bowl yet!

Go back to the main woodturning page here!