My first attempt at routed bowls - part 2

I left off on the last post ready to start routing so let's fire up the router and start cutting away the inside of the bowl.

Because the box elder wood is still green, each pass with the router is very quick and easy. Like cutting through butter. It also creates less dust and larger shavings. This is just after the first pass with the router:

To make the pass I angled the router bit into place to create an initial divot that allowed me to flatten the router out and then rout out the rest of the area. Each pass is fairly shallow, about 3/16". As you can see it creates a lot of shavings so I had to vacuum out the shavings after each pass. On the Woodsmith Shop when they made routed bowls they used the plunge base router. I found it easier to use the fixed base router, because it made depth adjustment really easy. Then it was a matter of just routing out each new depth, vacuuming and adjusting the depth until I reached the maximum depth of the router without the collet extension.

As you can see it's not terribly deep, about 1" or so. You might be wondering why I didn't just start with the collet extension on in the first place. Simple, on my router, DEWALT DW618PK, with the collet extension added the minimum depth I could get would be much too deep for an initial first pass. In other words, I couldn't get the router set shallow enough with the collet extension to start off with it. So I added on the collet extension, which you can see greatly increases my depth of cut.

So it was back to successive passes, gradually working away at removing the wood for the inside of the bowl. Really it was kind of fun to do. Once I started getting close to the depth I wanted, I used my combo square to measure the total depth from the outside including the template and then backed it off by 3/8", which would give me the inside depth I wanted. I know that 3/8" depth is somewhat thicker than you would normally make the bottom thickness for a wood bowl, but I wanted to add some extra depth to the rough cut, figuring it would give me a little bit of extra wiggle room to even out the bottom after warping from the wood drying.

Then I reached my final cut and took off the template:

You can see the grain pattern on the bottom of the inside is going to look awesome once it's sanded and finished!

Now here is where I started doing some variation between the two bowl blanks. One of the blanks I left in this stage to start the drying process, hoping that perhaps the solid outer block would minimize warpage. The other blank I took to the band saw and cut away the outer block, as you can see here:

So this is where I left it at the end of the first day. Two blanks, 1 cut to rough dimension both inside and out and the other cut only on the inside. So it was time to let the wood start to do some air drying - and warping as it turns out on both. So I'll pick up in the next post about the warping and what I did to try to counter act it.