All I did, was to make it round and smooth; nature did the rest!
So here's the story. A gentleman walks into the shop and introduces himself as the partner of a customer whose family have bought several pieces off me. He wants me to make something special for his partner's special birthday, and I'd have about 5 to 6 weeks to do it. His budget was in the region of £300, but flexible, so I told him about a big lump of oak burr that a tree surgeon had just brought me, and his ears pricked up. Next, I asked him if he could give me a brief to work to, so he took a good look at every bowl that I had in the shop and singled out one made from an alder burr. It had two enormous voids, bark inclusions and a couple of epic splits, stitched with black leather thong. So that was it.....just do something in that style, the rest was up to me. After a day or two's thought, I sent him some sketches with a proposal to band the bowl with copper wire, concealed by a stout leather thong, the joint in the thong being concealed by a turned oak-burr lozenge, with a semi-precious stone set into it.
Bingo! He liked the idea and then told me that his partner really loved Blue John stone, so I spent an arm and a leg to buy a decent sized cabochon.
I cut the burr circular to get the biggest possible blank out of it, which measured about 520mm x 180mm, with a lot of barky crust on the underside. Its weight, when first lifted onto the lathe, was in the region of 30kg, so a good lump and full of water. Then I turned it as round as I could, leaving it thick and heavy. The moisture content was a problem because most of the water seemed to be lying on one side and it was horribly out of balance. The whole thing was turned at about 200rpm - my lathe weighs a little under 250kg, yet it bounced about merrily!
Once cut, no sanding was done. My customer wanted the bowl to have a really natural look and feel, so I'd cut it as cleanly as I could and left any tool marks there. Four weeks passed, with the bowl being weighed regularly and it lost 25kg of water in that time. I would turn it upside down to ensure that the thickness of the foot had a good chance to dry, and I even left it out on sunny days to drive moisture out of it. Finally, I sanded it by hand with 180, 240 and 320 grit to remove all the spiky fibres and the bark inclusions were blasted clean with compressed air ( a process which I'd undertaken a few times over the four weeks of drying). The finishing touches of fitting the leather and the lozenge for the stone, involved some fiddly work to accommodate the silver wire bindings which close off the ends of the leather, which tucks into a 12mm hole on either side of the lozenge. The whole thing was brush-coated with boiled linseed oil on a bright sunny day, with the excess being immediately wiped off and buffed hard with soft paper - this necessitated blowing out all the cavities with compressed air again to remove the scraps of paper.
We blew the budget on this one, but my customer is happy about that and he takes delivery tomorrow.
Comments and criticisms always welcome....Les
