How I go about re-carving a bowl

It’s a bit challenging re-carving a bowl. I started these in ages past by essentially winging it. Then getting to watch Dave Fisher make bowls for the past 4 years told me two things. I’ll never make bowls as nicely as Dave. And I can get them better than these were when I shelved them. If you want to see him work, Fine Woodworking recorded a lot of video of his bowl carving. I subscribed just for that and it’s worth the price. Then everything else on the site is gravy. https://www.finewoodworking.com/2017/11/02/ep-1-finding-the-bowl-within-the-log

I didn’t shoot the whole step-by-step; but here’s some of what I did. The main area I needed to address on these bowls was the bulky over-thick bottoms and end grain. First I needed a new lengthwise centerline. I snug the bowl between two boards, then shift these around so they are parallel and touching the widest part of the bowl. Take a couple measurements, fiddle around a bit, then mark out a centerline. From there, I can follow Dave’s layout for an oval on the bottom.

I didn’t shoot a true “before” image; but you can see the new layout on the oversized, too-rectangular bottom of this butternut bowl.

The whole premise of this week-long exercise was to quickly determine if these were worth saving. So large tool, in this case a Swiss-made #5, about 35mm wide. And a heavy mallet. Big chunks coming off quickly is the goal. If I’m going to ruin things, I want to do it right away.

After roughing it out with the mallet, I switch to hand pressure to fine-tune some of the shape.

Different bowl, same area, same problem. In this case, I have a large #2 gouge, thus almost flat. I’m using it bevel-up to round over the underside of this tulip poplar bowl. You can only go so far with this tool. Once the cut begins its approach to concave instead of convex, you need to flip it over to bevel-down again. And then I use a bent gouge, with more “sweep” or curve to the blade. Usually a #5 when I’m using the Swiss tools.

Here’s a detail of that cutting action.

 

Here my left hand is snugged inside the bowl, and my thumb is pushing the tool down into the wood. This helps keep it in the cut as I push forward with my right hand.

The butternut bowl. I did have a “before” photo after all – before I whacked off that sapwood rim.

Now its shape is defined, and I want to go back over it to fine-tune the texture.

There’s still a few bowls left to work on, but one is for-sure gone for good:

I worked on five different bowls this week, and all of them are at the “just-about-done” stage. Soon I’ll have them for sale, along with some spoons, boxes and I don’t know what else. They can’t go back in the loft.

Cleansing, part-I-forget-which, three or four maybe

Dove in. These bowls/partial-bowls have been around for ages, some over 6 years. Can that be for real? I guess it can. I left the museum 5 years ago, and I see one large one that I started there…

The goal is to quickly either get these into a shape that satisfies, or chop them up & get rid of them. Having just spent 4 full days eaves-dropping on Dave Fisher’s classes gave me the impetus to get these down.

I worked on two different ones today, but didn’t photograph the morning session. Nor did I take a “before” of this one. But you can see what’s left of the original configuration – a too-large rectangular bottom. Dave showed his students a way to measure and layout a rounded/oval-ish shape for the bottom. In this photo, I’ve got the end to our right roughed-out for its new rounded shape, and am ready to start in on the other.

Big chunks is what I want at this point, I’d rather get some results quickly while risking chopping right through it, than to timidly chip away for eons. The wood is catalpa (Catalpa speciosa) I assume this one’s Northern Catalpa. It’s a very soft wood, ring-porous like oak, ash, etc. Pale brown color, like chestnut.

Because this one hung around so long, it oxidized. Now as I re-cut it, it’s showing a few different colors; the pale brown, a bluish/grey tint when I cut into it, then paler almost green color when I get down deeper. All mutable.

I’ll shoot more as I go further with these bowls. One nice thing about this work is I get to use some very nice tools I rarely get out. A couple of years ago I fit this box (also un-finished) for my bowl-carving gouges. Some are by Nic Westermann, and others by Hans Karlsson’s shop.

 

https://pfollansbee.wordpress.com/2017/07/03/chip-carved-box-for-bowl-gouges/

I got interrupted this afternoon. There was another heron in the garden. That sounds like something from James Thurber. They come after chipmunks, but how do they know there’s chipmunks here?

It took over half an hour, but he made his way up toward the house, and hunted (successfully) under the bird feeders.

Now he’s (she’s?) getting serious. Crouched down, hunting very slowly. From the shop, I couldn’t see the chipmunk. If you don’t want to see the gruesome bit, don’t scroll any further.

I missed the strike, the bird filled the frame too much and I didn’t have time to zoom out. But I got him with the chipmunk once he was upright again. A sad sight for chipmunk fans, but somewhere there’s young herons that will get a good regurgitated meal today. He took it to the river, dunked it repeatedly, then hogged it down. Then came back to the yard right away. It was high tide, so no good fishing for a while.

Just a box of rain

Well, it’s Friday of box week, which started out as bowl week. I don’t know how it got to Friday so quickly, but I managed to finish fitting bottoms and lids on two boxes yesterday. Some of it spilled into this morning.

 

I usually use white pine for bottoms and lids; many New England boxes from the period did just that. Otherwise, oak lids. I tend to save the oak for more carved parts, i.e. the next box. Thicknessing and flattening white pine is pretty easy; I don’t even use a hatchet. The scrub or fore plane is effective enough at quickly removing excess material. It comes to me usually a full inch thick. Flatten one side. 

Then, having laid out the intended thickness, I start in on the 2nd face. At first, just a wide bevel all around down to just above the scribed line.

For this work, I use a plane that has its iron re-ground to a wide curve. Set to take a thick shaving. You can see the bevel planed on this board, just under the back end of the plane.

Then I can go right across the board, using the bevels as a sighting aid. This quickly removes the excess thickness.

Shoot one edge, then trim to size.

And it goes on & on. Some lids get thumbnail moldings around their edges, some just a bevel. The bottom boards are beveled where they extend beyond the box to form a base.

These boxes mostly started life as a carving demonstration. then got stashed until I had time to make them into boxes. So I finished assembling two of them this week, some painting to finish up on this one from a week or so ago, but that has to wait for the rain to quit. Then it’s onto the next thing, which really is hewn bowls. The loft is crawling with them. You’ll see that next week.

One more box class that has space in it, at Connecticut Valley School of woodworking. October 12-16. Last I’ll speak of it… https://www.schoolofwoodworking.com/class-schedule/29-speciality-weekend-classes/635-make-a-carved-oak-box-with-peter-follansbee.html 

sooner or later one of us must know

I interrupted myself today to take care of a long-put-off task. Earlier this year, I took my lathe apart so I could build a trio of over-sized projects; a queen-size bed, a 7-foot high dresser and a large settle. My intention was when I finished those projects, I’d put the lathe back. Sooner or later.

A  couple of months went by…til today. I was enjoying having some extra floor space in the shop, but the plan all along was to make a new, shorter bed for it. This one is ash and fits 30″ between the centers, so I can turn joined stool parts, the front stiles of a wainscot chair and any small stuff I might need, like tool handles, etc.

The original bed is stashed up in the loft. It fits 50″ between centers, so takes up considerable room in the end of the shop. I’ll switch them around when I get occasion to turn those giant 17th-century style chairs.

This next photo shows the upright that forms the “headstock” if a lathe like this has one. The bed is fixed to the uprights by large iron bolts with washers & square nuts. All the hardware; these bolts, the centers, and the tool rest brackets were made by Mark Atchison back in 1994 when I was first working at my old shop in the museum.

Here’s the moveable “poppet” with its tool rest bracket inserted through it. You can see the wedge just below the bed that fastens the poppet in place.

The tool rest propped in the brackets.

I have no turner’s work coming up, so for now the lathe is shoved back against the rear wall. It fits 2 JA chairs tucked under it; waiting to be finished. And junk collects on the chair seats, an unfinished basket in this case. The foot treadle is stashed behind the lathe, and the spring pole is up in the peak of the ceiling.

For the time being, there’s easy access to the notebooks and other reference works. Many of you didn’t even know there was a bookcase in the shop probably.

Also important is access to the window looking out over the garden and the river. One day last week we looked out from the house and a great blue heron was under the bird feeders. He spooked and took off, but shortly after that came back & hung around the garden. Wouldn’t want to be a chipmunk that day…

 

A couple of years ago, Maureen planted milkweed to attract monarch butterflies. Today she found a caterpillar on one of the plants…

Box week

It was going to be bowl week. But I think it turned into box week. I don’t know what happened. Some of it stems from the great, not-quite-finished loft cleaning of spring 2019.

When I make a carved oak box they can go one of two ways. Some are reproductions/copies of existing boxes, as close as I can get them. This desk box is an example of that work. The measurements, decoration, construction are all based on an examination of a late 17th-century example.

This is one of the projects in the new book Joiner’s Work https://lostartpress.com/collections/books/products/joiners-work 

Here’s a look inside, showing one of two lidded tills, in front of a long tray at the back of the box. There’s four of those small drawers above.

When I’m just making boxes without any specific model, then I do things just a little differently. All the carvings are still derived from period work, as are the construction techniques. For instance, most New England boxes (& English ones) are joined with rabbets at the corners, not dovetails.

Unless I’m making a strict reproduction though, I tend to use glue and wooden pins to secure the rabbet, instead of the more common nailed rabbets. Just saves some handmade nails. There are some period boxes that are glued and pegged, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Here I’m driving the wooden pins into the box front-to-side joints.

In this next photo you see the square oak pegs, and then the finishing touches of gouged decoration along the ends of the box front. I saw this on a few boxes, but I usually put it on all of mine.

In these two new boxes you can see the extended pintle at the top rear corner. This becomes part of a wooden hinge. Again, I’ve seen this on period boxes, but it’s pretty rare, compared to iron hinges.

Here’s the cleat, attached to the underside of the lid, engaging that pintle. If you’re looking at details, you’ll see this box is sawn stock, not riven.

I’m teaching the carved box class a couple more times this year, the first Lost Art Press box class (late July) just sold out last week. After that is a week long class at Connecticut Valley School of Woodworking – October 12-16 https://www.schoolofwoodworking.com/class-schedule/29-speciality-weekend-classes/635-make-a-carved-oak-box-with-peter-follansbee.html 

Then the finale for the year back at Lost Art Press’ storefront in December – https://www.eventbrite.com/e/make-a-carved-oak-box-with-peter-follansbee-december-2019-tickets-54260677146

The class features lots of carving; a full day of practice, followed by a day carving the front and sides for the box. Here’s 7 of the 9 boxes the Australians carved last fall when I was there in the spring:

(The desk box shown above is also covered in the video I shot a few years ago with Lie-Nielsen about making boxes)  https://www.lie-nielsen.com/product/home-education-videos/carved-oak-boxes-with-peter-follansbee?node=4243

 

“Such a long, long time to be gone…

And a short time to be there…”

[I wrote this & forgot to post it. Re-phrased a little bit today. I boosted a number of photos from Marie Pelletier and Rick McKee – and Paula Marcoux did too, but that’s what they shoot them for. So more are on Plymouth CRAFT’s facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/PlymouthCRAFT/

Last week we finished up several woodworking classes and our first-ever “Spoon Day.” Plymouth CRAFT is really lucky. We have a very receptive and generous audience. We didn’t even know what Spoon Day would be & we knew it they’d flip out over it. The one-day event was wedged in between two 2-day courses taught by Dave Fisher and JoJo Wood. The venue for Spoon Day was Bay End Farm; http://www.overbrookhouse.com/bay-end-farm an idyllic spot down in Bourne, Massachusetts. As far as I we can tell, it all went swimmingly. The responses that we’ve heard were glowingly positive.

Here’s the class photo from JoJo’s class for women

Tim Manney did his sharpening scene at Spoon day; they were lined up all day to work their edges with him.

Some of the spoon carvers…

I worked with some folks on knife grips at one point –

JoJo beaming during one of her classes.

And with one of her students.

An overview of the tent for spoon day.

Dave Fisher showing his adze work.

 

I wish my first bowl looked that good…

Group photo for bowl class # 2.

Running even a smaller-scale event like this – one day instead of three, about 75 attendees instead of 125 – still requires a lot of setup and breakdown. One by one our instructors trickled in; and it’s always a highlight of our year when we get to spend so much time with our far-flung friends. Tim Manney arrived and he & I immediately launched into a long discussion about chairs, chairmaking friends, and all things related. We could have gone on for hours, and in fact picked right up again a day later and did. And we all had multiple interactions like this over & over during our days together. Some were here longer or shorter; and one-by-one they trickled out as they had come in. Many thanks to all the volunteers who helped us set up & break down.

And just like that, it was over. Thanks all, for a great time.