More Small Bowls from Indexer

[Fleming]

Must be Bowl Season
Here are some more bowls recently done on my indexer.

Thanks for looking.

Flowers on Lattice carved in cherry

Oak Leaves carved in walnut

Flowers on Ripples in walnut

Eagles

Eagle Scripture

[dwilli9013]

Simply stunning work. Thanks so much for sharing.

[mtylerfl]

Beautiful job on all, Fleming! I'm a little partial to the Eagle one...I created that model (https://store.designandmake.com/shop/product/10042)

[Leo]

Fantastic.

That is on my bucket list.

[mfirlott]

Exquisite!

[martin54]

Wow, these are stunning, thanks for sharing

[bolingerbe]

This is excellent work. Makes me want to finish learning my how to use my indexer. Thank you for sharing and inspiring others

[PaulRowntree]

Very nice! what would the diameters be ?

[Fleming]

Thank you for the kind comments. These are fun to make and fairly easy with Aspire and an indexer.


Paul, most of these bowls are 5-6" in diameter and 3-4" tall.

[SteveNelson46]

These bowls are the only ones I have seen using an indexer (I think). Your design and workmanship is outstanding. If I may ask, how did you hollow the inside?

[Fleming]

Steve,

I rough out the bowls on a normal lathe before putting them on the indexer. I usually leave the wall thickness about 1" or so depending on the wall shape I design in Aspire for the 3D carving. See topic

http://forum.vectric.com/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=26448

for how I do exact shaping of the inside of the bowl if I need that - otherwise I just put the carved bowl back on the lathe and finish the inside. I am still experimenting with the best process for doing all this when I have a design that "cuts through" the wall so the bowl has a lighter feel to it. I will post examples of that once I cut one successfully.

Paul

[martin54]

Paul bowl making is something that I have just started to look at, put a post up about one that went wrong & Leo happened to comment about stress relieving. Have watched quite a lot of videos by hand turners who rough out a bowl shape & then put the piece to one side for a year or so before remounting it & finishing it.
Is this something you have had any problems with making any of the bowls that you do ??

I don't have a rotary axis so an limited in what I can actually do but got ideas for a few different basic shapes which I think I will probably be able to produce using 2 sided machining

[Fleming]

Martin,

For the most part I turn the bowls "green". I find that cheery, walnut, and most fruit woods are fairly stable as they dry when turned that way. I usually rough turn leaving the sides about 3/4" thick and then a couple days later do a final turning and immediately put on the CNC for carving. The stock I have been using are from trees on my property that have died or been blown down.

The disadvantage, especially with wet walnut, is they tend to be fuzzy and require more sanding and cleaning up. Buying large pieces of wood that are already dry (air dried is preferable to kiln-dried) is fairly expensive - especially when like me you are on a learning curve and hate to burn a piece of wood you just paid $20 to $30 bucks for

Lately I have been experimenting with two techniques to maximize use of the wood. In the first one I use the same technique as used for making bandsaw boxes whereby I cut out the center of a 2" thick piece and then slip the two pieces apart and glue them back together with about an 1/4" overlap thus ending up with a 3 3/4" thick piece to work with as shown below:

Making 2" thick into 3 3/4" thick

The other technique is to simply glue two pieces together to get a thicker piece and design it in such a way that the glue line is hidden underneath as shown in this 2" piece of cherry on top of a 1" piece of walnut.

Carved cherry on top of walnut base

Be glad to answer any other questions you may have. I encourage you to make some and eventually add an indexer

Paul

[martin54]

Paul, why is air dried preferable to kiln dried wood ?
Not actually sure where I would be able to get hold of fruit woods but will look into that, I buy most of my wood from the same Sawmill & it is all sourced fairly locally I have seen the odd bit of cherry but that is about all I have seen up there.

[SteveNelson46]

Paul,

I missed your post last month with the explanation of how you hollowed the inside until today. Thank you for explaining it. Your work is just beautiful.