Cypress bowl on the lathe.
Same bowl on the bench.
A few other shop pictures…
A white oak chair leg for a repair job, being bent in a form. The leg was turned and bent while green. You can see my first failed attempt.
flattening a walnut half for turning with a fore-plane
Here are two different 3-legged stools, in Green Ash.
This one has a handle, like a milking stool.
An Ash plate, bowl, walnut bowl, and a small persimmon dish.
This is a little three leg stool, turned from black walnut on the pole lathe. The seat is sawn, not turned, then I used a little gouge on the edges and where the tenons from the legs come through. The turning is intended to resemble bells and clappers.
Below is a stack of mostly quarter sawn red oak Quercus rubra for air drying. There is some green ash under that pile too.
a detail of some of the “ray flecking” on one of the boards.
The stack under cover.
In order to make a bead detail for some frame molding I could either buy a router bit or make a new cutter for my scratch stock (a traditional shop-made molding cutter or scraper). I believe that it is good to make your own tools when you can.
Below is the new cutter in the body of the scratch stock (similar to a marking guage), a piece of scrap walnut that has recieved the molding and an old triple flute cutter I made last winter.
The profile is marked on the blank before cutting. The blank is roughly cut from an old handsaw blade with a cold chisel then filed smooth.
The profile is then cut out with a dremel cut-off wheel…
then cleaned up with files.
The finished profile cutter in the scratch stock body and the resulting bead cut into the walnut.
We have been making a lot of bowls lately, here are some of them.
A row of bowls on the mantle. Some are turned on a foot powered pole-type lathe and some on an electric lathe.
One in green ash, and one in cottonwood.
One in bald cypress and one in walnut.
Bowl blanks just cut and ready to have the ends coated with paraffin. Species here are, persimon, green ash, post oak, black walnut, and bald cypress.
Two new bowls in green ash. The one on the left was turned by my wife.
The second bowl, in ash. I counted forty growth rings in this bowl, and it represents less than half of the tree’s radius.
The ash bowl with oiled with walnut oil.
Two bowls. One in walnut and one in ash.
Hollowing the walnut bowl on the lathe
Below are a series of pictures of turning a black walnut bowl on the pole lathe.
Shaping the sides with a roughing gouge.
Starting to hollow it out.
Below are some pictures of the main carcass for the headboard-chest of a black walnut bed underway in the shop right now. It was dry fit for the first time yesterday. It was quite a challenge to get the nearly eighty hand-cut dovetails to mate properly.
The tops of the boards are still rough- they will be shaped a little- softened- but mainly left as is. The lid will “float” inside the top of the chest.
A foreshortened side view. Here one can see all the dovetails- yet to be trimmed- th chest will be taken apart and re-assembled a few times before final assembly, where after the pins and tails will be trimmed flush.
A detail of a Q.S. white oak butterfly- decoratively and hopefully functionally placed in a knot with a small split. There are quite a few butterflies throughout the piece for the task of securing splits and abnormalities- the joys of screwball Kansas walnut.
The School of the Transfer of Energy 