So Much To Be Done!
I’ve got plenty of time.
Green turned bowls drying, some still wrapped in paper and short pieces of figured wood including maple, redwood, claro walnut, cherry, black walnut, ash, oak and some exotics like sapele, makore etc.
Most of my bowls are made from freshly cut logs from storm damage or lot clearing. I get these logs from a variety of places including neighbors, customers and tree services. In a previous blog post i posted videos of my “log yard” which is very full right now. I am making progress turning logs into green bowls (bowls made from freshly cut logs). I have previously posted the process I use but in short the steps are:
Make a bowl blank from a section of log. I usually get two blanks from a section.
Turn the “green” bowl. If the log section is big, I core several smaller bowls from each blank. Date the bowl and put the species on the bottom with a grease pencil.
Soak the green bowls in denatured alcohol. That sterilizes the wood and helps dewater it.
Coat the bowls with Anchorseal emulsion wax then wrap in brown paper. That slows the drying process to reduce cracking as the bowl shrinks. Put the date on the brown paper.
Take the paper off after 3 months.
Allow a few more months drying time (the bigger/thicker the bowl, the longer the final drying time.)
Turn the dry bowl to finished dimensions.
The pictures here will give you a sense of what it takes to make enough bowls to make this a full time job. I have a total of nine racks that are full of bowls drying or waiting to be finish turned. I may need nine more when I turn the rest of the logs into bowls!
These very big commercial trash cans are full of denatured alcohol. The red one is for walnut, the blue one for everything else.
Logs in the yard waiting to become bowl blanks. I have cherry, walnut, river birch, sugar maple, southern (soft) maple, sweet gum and silver maple logs. This picture has about half of the ones that are queued up in the yard.
I’m only 74 (next month)!
Most of these bowls are dry enough to finish turn. On the bottom right are blocks of figured wood that will one day become bowls.
More shelves of drying bowls.
You can see some bowl blanks waiting to be turned, a box with small wax coated chunks of wood and a bunch of green turned bowls waiting for finish turning.
Looking down into the vat you can see a few submerged bowls. They stay in the vats for 3-5 days or until Pennie is available. She coats the bowls with Anchorseal and wraps them in brown paper.