I figured the one bowl that I cut away the outer block would warp more than the bowl that I left the outer block attached, take a look at my last post on routed bowls if you aren't sure what I'm talking about :) As it turns out I pretty much didn't know what I was talking about. Each bowl warped about equally. So once I saw that the bowls were starting to warp I did what I could to counteract the warpage. The box elder wood I was using had a tendency to warp in an oval inwards towards the bowl opening. This warp seemed to follow the grain so that the longest part of the oval ran to the end grain. This may be obvious to experienced green wood workers or bowl turners but this was my first time using green wood and making a bowl.
So to try to counteract the warping I put some weight on the bowl trying to force it back to round. I first started with the bottom of the bowl, which was cupping up towards the end grain. On each bowl I put about 8 to 10 lbs of weight on the bottom to try to flatten the bottom back out. I left the weights on the bowls as they continued to air dry and had pretty good success with that. Although the oval shape was still obvious, especially on the bowl that I cut away the outer block. So on that bowl I turned it on its side and put the weight on one end of the oval. Again I left it to continue drying and had some success there as well.
Well, after letting the bowls dry for a few days the moisture content got down to 18% and pretty much decided to stay there (I live in a very humid environment, so I figured that was as good as it was going to get). So I decided it was time to get back to finishing the shaping. Honestly, I couldn't wait. I was chomping at the bit to get back to working on these!
So I cut away the outer block on the second bowl at the band saw and I was ready to roll. The next step was to rough sand away all of the cut marks from the band saw on the outside, which you can see here:
I swear I should get paid for product placement in these pictures ;) So far I've shown you my Craftsman band saw, my DeWalt router and my Ridgid oscillating spindle sander. Just wait, in two more pictures you are going to see a whole bunch of tools, lol. Anyway, I also sanded the bottom of the bowls relatively flat with the belt sander attachment on the sander too. I'll do some final leveling later with the finish sanding.
The important thing is that with the outer bowl rounded and smoothed with the sander I could take it to the router table and cut the bottom edge profile into the bowl. I used a round over bit to create a nice shape across the base as well as give a nice edge to the base, which you can see here:
Box elder apparently is pretty soft wood, softer than I was expecting anyway. I ended up with a fair amount of tear out and burn marks when doing the routing, especially around the end grain. So this was going to require quite a bit of sanding later to smooth out. But live and learn.
So next I rolled out the drill press to use two different sanding attachments for the initial sanding of the inside of the bowl. The first attachment is for sanding the sides of the bowl, which you can see here:
See, I told you there would be a lot of product pictures. You can see my Craftsman drill press, my Craftsman table saw, my Craftsman jointer, my Ryobi planer, my Ryobi compound miter saw... So anyway, next up was to sand the inside bottom, which takes another specialty attachment. The real money isn't in making the pieces, it's in selling the attachments that make the pieces. Lord knows, they have enough of my money. So here you can see that attachment too:
I ran into a bit of a problem with this attachment. It's sanding ability is much more vigorous than the sanding attachment for the sides of the bowls. What happened was when running this attachment around the bottom and the bottom sides it actually created a recess in the sides. Oops. I'll have to be more careful about that in the future. This time it just meant doing some extra sanding on the sides to correct it.
So it was at this point that I left off for that day. In the next post I'll pick up on the finish shaping and sanding and then applying finish.
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