Mountaintop

Well I've been to the mountaintop. I had a class last week at Highland Woodworking with Mike Mahoney, world class bowl turner. There were only about ten of us in the class including one young man about sixteen years old. I think the young guy summed it up for all of us when he decided the one big thing he got out of the class was "I am not as good as I thought I was."

There is a group of people out there who are head and shoulders above the rest of us when it comes to turning wood. Mike demonstrated a bowl for us on the lathe and then we were all supposed to make one of our own. He roughed his bowl out in less than 15 minutes and it was perfect. It had a beautiful line to it and the wall thickness was completely consistent. Took all the rest of us about three hours to screw one up. It really makes you appreciate the skill and talent it takes to make a beautiful bowl.

On the second day, Mike made a hollow form for us to try to duplicate. He started the same way and in about ten minutes turned a piece of green wood into a classic Grecian urn shape. He looked at it a second and decided it might look good as a contemporary shape, so in about fifteen seconds, he cut off an eighth of an inch in a particular spot and it was contemporary. He looked at it again and decided to go back to the classic, and in another fifteen seconds, he took off another eighth and it was done. Absolutely beautiful.

You know how in the Bible, the parables always start out by saying ... "the Kingdom of Heaven is like this." They said this so you would recognize how far from the Kingdom you really are. Watching Mike turn is like that, you see him do it and realize how far from
the Kingdom you really are. Go look at his web site -- http://www.bowlmakerinc.com/.

I am embarassed to say that it was only when I got home after the classes that I realized I have been using his oil finish for several years. I just never connected the name and the teacher and the finish. It is my favorite finish.

The Smell of Cedar

I have been working on some cedar bowls lately. The smell is attractive to some people but after awhile I get really tired of it. If you create some dust, it is real fine dust and it gets in everything including your nose. The shop is filled with it and between the dust, and the chips and the bowl itself, there is just a huge smell of cedar all in the shop. My dust collector is working overtime, but there is no getting rid of the smell.

The cedar bowl turned out pretty well I think. It had a bit of decay in the center of the log so the the top of the rim has a notch out of it. You have to be really careful when it is turning because the notch will catch the tool or the sandpaper or your hand and it can be dangerous. I have this image of me spinning around at about 800 rpm when the notch catches my hand. (I would hate to get the bed of the lathe messed up with chunks of me.)

I am also working on a walnut bowl for a friend. The wood comes from a log off the ancestral home over in west Georgia. The log had been lying out by the barn for many years and when I went to get it, it was really wet and heavy. All the sap wood which is softer than the center of the tree had rotted away and it took us a while to cut it into chunks. When I got it back to the shop and started cutting it up and splitting it, I barked my shin with the splitting wedge after it popped out of the log when I hit it with the sledge hammer. When I finally started turning a bowl, I found a nail buried deep inside the bowl blank. Any turner hates for that to happen. We spend a lot of time getting the tools sharp and they are expensive on top of that. You are just standing there blissfully turning away and you realize there is a strange ticking noise which should not be happening. That is a piece of metal that is fast dulling your chisel. I got the bowl rough cut and it was so wet that water was dripping from the bowl onto the bed of the lathe. It will take a while for that to dry.

Keep on turning.

Ambrosia Maple

I just went by the best woodworking store in the world (personal opinion), Highland Woodworking in Atlanta, and they had just gotten in some new turning blanks. Normally I like to use more found wood than anything else, but when you turn green wood you have to wait for it to dry after you have roughed out the bowl. Usually takes three to six months for it to dry enough so the finished bowl will not shrink, crack or warp. Sometimes I just don't want to wait. So I bought an eight inch diameter three inch thick bowl blank of "ambrosia maple". Pretty expensive at $19 but you just won't believe how pretty the stuff is. It is a light tan or biege for the most part, but it has these beautiful spots and stripes running through it like some kind of mutated Holstein cow. I've seen some pieces which were turned from ambrosia maple but made by turning from the end of the grain and hollowing down the center of the tree so to speak. Doing it that way makes a beautiful pattern in the wood, but I normally turn ninety degrees from that and it produces an entirely different pattern. Trouble with paying for wood is that sometimes you mess it up --I have a beautiful walnut bowl from a bought blank which has a bottom you can see through. I mean paper thin. Sad!! Hope my skills are up to this one. If so, it will be posted on the etsy site for sale. I'll let you know.