Bowl making

Here's a bowl I made.

Raw materials

This beauty was hewn from a lump of elm. I converted this timber from the trunk of the old dead elm tree that was in my garden.

I just sawed off a hunk of it. Because this came from quite a small trunk, it had quite interesting grain. It has a knot in it too, which adds to the variation in grain pattern.

Before I could turn this in the lathe, I needed to add a face plate. This is a circular plate with a perpendicular spindle attached. The plate is screwed onto the work piece and the spindle is held in the chuck of the lathe. I didn't have one, so i made one from this old wall mount. It was originally a bracket for holding a handrail for stairs

I cut off the 90 degree bit of it with the angle grinder

Et voila...  The face plate is the left hand bit.

I then attached this to the untrimmed block of elm wood.
Note, you need pilot holes for the screws to avoid stressing the grain and potentially splitting it

Here it is attached with three 20mm screws. The block itself is about 55mm thick. About 15mm of the screw bodies are actually in the wood, with about 5mm proud of the wood because of the thickness of the faceplate. This meant I could hollow out to a depth of about 40mm without hitting a screw

Next, I needed to cut the square block to a roughly cylindrical shape. This makes turning it much easier. I used a handy roll of masking tape as a template to draw cutting lines. It just happened to be the same diameter as the narrowest width of the block.

Here is the block marked with the cutting lines...

With the block held in the vice, i sawed off the waste up to the edge of the circular cutting line with a circular saw.

The trimmed block...

The block could now be fitted into the lathe.

I've missed a few shots of shaping the outer bowl shape, but it was chiselled.

Here, I'm using a long thin chisel to cut into the centre to form the bowl shape. Note, for stability and safety, a fairly large centre piece was left while doing this. This was removed later.

After shaping and hollowing with chisels, the bowl needed a lot of sanding.  started with rough 60 grit paper...

...eventually moving down to finer grades of paper. This one is 120 grit

You can see various grades of paper in this shot
It is worth noting that the best paper for this is to use the tough sheets and pieces of belts and discs made for attaching to belt sanders and velcro-fastening sheet sanders. They are super tough and don't rip.

The bowl after a lot of sanding

I gave the bowl a final plish using emery paste on a piece of leather. This is normally used to polish and sharpen razors, chisles etc. It is a very fine grit in a paste.

It is also pigmented, so it added a nice richness to the wood.

After polishing...

Whilst the bowl was looking great, it still had the internal plug of waste wood needed to connect it to the conical support in the lathe tail-stock.

To remove this, I took the bowl out of the lathe and trashed this with a flat wood bit...

...then ground the messy stump down with a rough burr bit in the die grinder...

Once the majority of the central plug was removed, I popped the bowl back in the chuck and cleaned the interior of the bowl with the flat chunky chisel

After this, there was also a load more sanding.

Here it is staright out of the lathe...

And with the face plate removed - nice!

 The sanding left the bowl in its raw wood colour

 Some more polishing with the emery paste put back some of the richness.