Presentation
Turner: Frank Bowers
Project: From Log to Bowl
Frank started the presentation with a few comments on safety, listing two major cautions which can eliminate 90% of accidents:
1) The wood should be free to rotate without hitting anything (ways, banjo, tool rest).
2) The lathe speed should be appropriate for the situation.
(editors note; some of these pictures were taken directly from the TV monitor which accounts for the low resolution)
Frank began with a poplar log which was cut in half, then bandsawn to a circle. Note the pocket drilled with a forstner bit to provide a place for the center to engage solid wood.
Frank’s tool of choice for roughing a bowl blank is a ½” bowl gouge. He encourages turners to use every cut as a practice cut for the final cut.
When forming the spigot, he likes to size it so the inside grip of the chuck jaws to forms a circle. This gives the maximum contact between the chuck and the wood.
After turning the outside of the blank and forming the spigot, Frank began hollowing the bowl blank with the ½“ bowl gouge.
The completed rough-turned bowl has a wall thickness roughly 1/10 of the diameter (1” thick walls for a 10” diameter bowl).
At this point, the rough-turned blank is set aside to dry, usually in a paper bag or cardboard box to limit air circulation. Frank does not use any coatings on his blanks, and they dry well in the local humidity. He sometimes soaks a bowl in Denatured Alcohol to reduce warpage.
At this point, Frank mounted a bowl blank which had dried over the past 6 months to continue his demonstration. The inside bottom of the bowl is placed against the chuck jaws with a padded disc (made from a mouse pad) to protect the wood and the tailstock clamps it all together.
Frank switches to a 3/8” bowl gouge for turning the dried blank.
For the final finish surface on the exterior of the bowl, Frank tried John Jordan’s sheer scraper, but switched to a sheer scrape using the bowl gouge. Different tools work best depending on the wood.
On the interior of the bowl, Frank runs into some difficulty with chatter. He attempts to remove it with a conventional ground bowl gouge. As you can see from the scalloped spiral pattern near the rim, this did not eliminate the chatter. Frank mentioned that he’d uses a bowl steady for this situation in his studio.
Frank made another attempt to eliminate the chatter using a multi-tip scraper, then moved on to smoothing the lower interior using a standard left-hand scraper.
Here is the finish-turned bowl.
By Kurt Whitley, Secretary
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