Woodcraft

Getting some cardio in on a warm and humid Sunday afternoon with a couple of homemade hand tools. First is flattening one side of a slab cut from a spalted Maple log, using my recently completed bench plane. Second is **attempting** to resaw the Maple slab into two thinner slabs using the Roubo frame saw I finished yesterday evening. Resawing Maple by hand, even the softer spalted kind, is not a trivial task. This is going to take a few days. Guys on YouTube make resawing with a Roubo saw look easy. It's not.

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Update on my saga of resawing the remainder of the spalted Silver Maple log by hand. I have a whole new appreciation of those Colonial craftsmen who built a whole country with such equipment. It took me several hours over a 3 day period to split that Maple slab, and that was after squaring off the edges and cutting starter kerfs with my table saw. At that point, my will to be a hand tool purist wilted and I finished cleaning up the boards with my surface planer and drum sander. While I enjoy using hand tools for certain tasks, there are other tasks for which I am going to stick with power tools. And if I have need of resawing such a wide board again, I'll look to hire out the work to a shop with a commercial bandsaw.

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One final DIY hand tool completed this afternoon, a small block plane. The wood for the body and lever cap began life as a Walnut & Maple lamination for a guitar project somewhere around 15 years ago. The cutoff from that guitar neck bounced around my garage and shop for over 10 years until I used it for a ukulele neck about 2 1/2 years ago. Then the cutoff from that ukulele neck went into a box until I got the idea to make a wooden block plane. It works well, and is shown with the DIY bench plane for scale. I'll take a day off from woodworking to go on a nice bike ride, then I'm back to ukuleles and bowls.

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Today I finished my largest turning yet, a natural edge spalted Silver Maple pedestal bowl. Finished size is 8.25" across and 6" high. I have a lot of that spalted Maple left, some cut into bowl-sized blanks, some cut into thin slabs to be used in a ukulele project next year.

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Since I finished the last bowl in my drying stack, I figured it was time to make more. Today was Day 1 of a live edge Bradford Pear hollow form. My first time working with Bradford, it cut and sanded easily. 9" across and 6" deep, it weighed 12.5 pounds when first mounted on the Shopsmith.

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Day 2 of the live edge Bradford Pear hollow form. It was such a beautiful day here to throw open the garage and spend 4 hours or so making shavings. Sanded to a glass smooth finish inside and out, the vessel has been packed in a bag of fresh shavings, to be weighed weekly until it stops losing weight. I removed almost 10 pounds of shavings during the carving process.

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Ukulele on #14 is well under way. First fitting of the rough cut neck. It was a perfect fit on the first attempt, a first for me. I've always had to do a bit of mild sanding, known as "flossing", to tweak the alignment on previous builds. The difficulty ratchets up considerably at this point with the bindings and arm bevel up next.

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I spent pretty much the entire day today working on my latest and largest wood turning, a piece I released from a triple-crotch Mimosa blank I cut from a log I found in a pile of discarded tree cutoffs. My first time working with Mimosa wood, the raw blank was 12” in diameter and weighed just a few ounces under 21 pounds. The piece weighed 2 lb 13 oz in the last image. It needs more sanding, but it was getting dark by the time I reached that point, so I carefully packed the bowl in a large box of wet shavings, and cleaned up the mess I had made all over the garage. I enjoy woodturning, but it is physically demanding and very messy.

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The latest musical instrument to emerge from my little workshop is a baritone ukulele, just finished this morning. This one is special, as every scrap of wood in the instrument, inside and out, is from a tree that grew here in my home state, including the 100+ year old reclaimed American Chestnut used in the neck. This build had some real challenges and took me a good bit longer than I expected, but I am most pleased with how it turned out.

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Besides your stunning instruments you create, what fascinates me every time anew is that you seem to see the final product in the raw piece of wood lying before you. So, as the great sculptors said, the only thing to do is to take away all that's superfluous. And concerning the results of your woodwork you're definitely a real artist, Tony.
 
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wee-pics said:
Besides your stunning instruments you create, what fascinates me every time anew is that you seem to see the final product in the raw piece of wood lying before you. So, as the great sculptors said, the only thing to do is to take away all that's superfluous. And concerning the results of your woodwork you're definitely a real artist, Tony.
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Thank you Walter.
 
Beautiful afternoon here, so I threw open the garage and worked on my first turnings of 2023. Spalted Walnut on the left, spalted Hackberry on the right.

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For the past couple of weeks when I could sneak away, I've been preparing bowl blanks both huge and tiny. Sycamore, White Oak, Bradford Pear, and Hickory. That massive Sycamore crotch will have to be cut down to fit on my lathe, but I'm hoping it contains some magnificent figure. All 3 forks will be part of the design. Going to be a busy Spring.

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No woodwork today, but I did take advantage of a gorgeous Spring-like January afternoon to get in some maintenence, cleaning, and waxing on my 1955 Shopsmith, which has been upgraded through the years with several modern enhancements. Amazing that many factory parts are still available for this 67+ year old beast. The big spalted Sycamore blank next to the tool rest is my next bowl project.

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Some recently completed turning projects. The first is my largest turning to date, a live edge Mimosa crotch bowl. It weighed 21 pounds when first mounted on the lathe, and 1 lb 8.4 oz after almost 4 months in the drying box.

I also made myself a natural edge pen pot for my modest collection of turned writing instruments, from a cracked and heavily spalted chunk of Red Oak, and used one of the off-cuts from the project to make a very nice looking cigar pen. The pot took many lathe sessions and liberal use of both CA and Varathane to stabilize the punky wood for sanding, as well as fortify the cracks. I like the end result.

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