Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground, brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding of Common Ground is made possible, in part, by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their 2nd century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Welcome to Common Ground.

I'm Producer/Director Scott Knudson.

In this episode, Rob Carothers of the rural Turtle River, Minnesota area demonstrates woodturning and performs with some of his old bandmates.

We're going to start today turning a small walnut log and just give a little process about what we are going to do in this first step.

So we're going to take the log and it's not big, you'll see it in a second, and we're going to cut it down the center, and a lot of people think that the bowl sort of lives on the top here, but actually the bowl is pretty much based in the side of the the wood.

We're going to take the wood, we're going to look at it, see if there's any kind of irregularities or strange pieces on it, identify where a good halfway part is, and we'll create two bowl blanks out of that.

Once we have the the bowl cut out of there, we'll have two (2) pieces that will look kind of rectangular and that will be the the side of the... the bark will be out here.

At this point, we're going to take a template, and we're going to find a circle, and again, looking for maybe irregularities that we'll find inside the bowl, and we'll draw a a circle in the wood.

At that point, we'll take the chainsaw and we're just going to cut off the corners and try to get it as best we can to be somewhat round.

At that point, we've created a bowl blank and we'll take that into the lathe and continue the negotiations with the wood and see what we can come up with.

This is the piece of walnut we're going to start with.

It was cut last summer and sat all this winter.

I covered it in some wax to sort of slow the drying process but I noticed we got some cracks and checking.

We're going to find a good line in this wood and I can see that the "heart wood" is right here.

I also noticed we got this knot to this branch that's sticking out; that's going to add some weirdness to this side , too, so maybe that's good, we'll just cut it down here - we'll have the small one with the weirdness, and then we'll have this larger one that we can play with today.

Now we have two halves, we can make two bowls out of this wood.

This is an 11 inch circle , this will be the top of the bowl the opening will be dug out of this spot.

We have the the rough blank.

All right, welcome to my shop.

Now, what I've done is I've located the center of that circle, generally speaking, and it doesn't have to be perfect, and what we're going to do is attach the face plate to that, and I kind of use the center as a guide, so I've noticed that the face plate is kind of sitting a little cockeyed here, just kind of the way I cut it, so what I'd like to do is I'm going to take a little chisel and just kind of take down that so that the face plate kind of sits as flush as possible before we attach it there.

I'm just going to line the template back up with our mark that we made, just kind of get a rough idea, just use a screwdriver to kind of put it in the middle there, make a mark that looks about right and line it up again.

So now we've got the face plate mounted and we're going to put it onto the lathe.

This lathe is able to do logs that are 16 inches in diameter, our template was 11 inches.

By the time we get this all done, this is probably going to be an 8 or 9 inch bowl at the opening, and it'll probably be about 3 or 4 inches deep.

We're going to use primarily three (3) tools.

This is called a Bowl Gouge, and it has a kind of a hollowed-out shape to it and the cutting edges are on the side of this.

This is pretty much going to be our primary tool for taking off large volumes of material.

Another tool we'll use is called a Parting Tool.

This is what we'll use to cut direct lines into the wood.

The other ones that we'll use are called a Round Nose Scraper or Round Scraper.

This is just a big beefy piece of steel, it's got about an 18 degree angle on it, and we'll be cutting on that top lip there.

I use this belt sander to sharpen these tools, so because this is off balance a little bit, I'm probably not going to start the lathe off at the fastest it can go - that's at third gear.

("3") You want to get the lathe spinning as fast as you can while the wood is still balanced on the lathe, so I might try it at "3" and just see what we get - it's kind of small, but this might get interesting.

Is the lathe going crazy, is it vibrating and shaking?

I don't think so, I think we can probably get away with starting right off on Gear "3".

The next thing I'm gonna do is move the "tool rest".

That probably looks like a good place to start so I'll ratchet down and tie down this, and then also the tool rest.

I can adjust as I need to.

I think that looks probably pretty good, we'll tie that down.

When we do this, there's going to be pieces flying everywhere, so it's VERY important to always wear a face shield, and also, this wood is relatively green.

I can turn dry wood, too.

There's pros and cons to it - I like turning green wood, and then drying it in the roughed out shape and coming back later.

I think it's easier to turn, and a little more forgiving, because it still has some moisture in the wood.

We're going to start at the back and come forward a little bit and just taking out little bite-sized pieces.

We frequently start and stop the machine just to sort of check on what we're doing - we can always see some of those rough angles have been sort of taken off and that allows us to move the tool rest in just a little bit closer.

We want to keep that as close as possible, my teacher's name is Dick Casagrande, and he was a friend of my dad's in Rhode Island, so that's how I got started.

When I was visiting my dad last summer, his best friend Dick was like, "what's Rob doing"?

During the day he's like "wanna come over and learn how to turn bowls"?

We wouldn't cut down a cherry tree and cut it up, and really started this process straight from the very beginning.

Okay, we're getting closer, we still got some flat part here so we have to keep turning that down to get rid of that, we'll move the tool rest in a bit, over in this corner, and we'll kind of work on the bottom.

Oh, we're close, just a couple little spots here we gotta bring down, but we're getting there.

I'm gonna work on this just a little bit more and try to get some of those flat pieces down.

The next part we'll do is going to work on the bottom.

It's at this point, too, where I'm starting to get a sense of what the shape of the piece is going to be.

We're going to put this "tenon" piece on the back so that we have some place to attach that face plate.

It's going to be a kind of a smaller bowl maybe we'll do something like 3 or 4 inches, and do kind of a traditional bowl shape.

I'm going to go in about an inch, and the next thing I'm going to do is sort of level off this piece here, so that the face plate has a nice flat surface to attach to.

I like to use this little round nose scraper, it does a good job of making things clean.

To help me find Center, again, when I attach the face plate to this I usually like to draw a couple little circles.

With that in place, what we'll start doing is cutting away the material here to expose that "tenon" and then we can really see the shape of the bowl.

Now we understand where the bottom of the bowl is going to be, and now I can really start thinking of "what is this bowl going to look like"?

I'm going to continue to round this off and make it look uniform.

Again, this piece is going to sit on the shelf for 3 or 4 months and warp and hopefully not crack.

We're just roughing the bowl at this point, just getting it in a general shape, and we'll be able to finish it in a couple months.

What I'm going to do is get the round scraper and we'll just kind of smooth this all down and then we'll flip it over and start working on the inside.

We've mounted the face plate back to the bottom and we'll reattach it to the lathe.

If we got it centered, when we spin it, we shouldn't see too much wobble, it should be pretty close, and that is pretty darn close.

When we give it a spin, we might be able to see a little wobble there, but I think it's going to be okay.

What we're going to do now is we're going to start in the middle and we're going to just go in and we're going to start forming the sides of the bowl.

Let's make this face flat, then we'll start hollowing it out, taking out the insides, and we'll see what's inside there.

This is the most exciting part, I think, doing the inside.

We're going to make the walls about 10 percent the thickness of the whole diameter.

So if this bowl is 10 inches wide, we want the walls, and the bottom, - to be about one (1) inch.

That's usually the best practice.

You notice a lot of times I'll come in like this, it's about the approach - the edge that you're using on the gouge to touch the wood and you'll end up tilting it and twisting it and lowering it down.

It's just the kind of things that I've just picked up the feel of doing it.

I've never heard anybody say, "Oh, you got to hold it like this," but you just kind of learn your tool and the wood that you're working with and how it best responds to an approach.

If I just went in there fast, it would catch, and there'd be drama, so it's just little pieces you're scraping, just the surface of it, and working your way down there - always trying to get the tool rest as close to the wood as possible to sort of eliminate that.

Okay, so now we gotta be a little concerned about going too deep, we don't want to cut through the bottom, we want the bottom to be 1 inch, like I said, this thing is going to sit on a shelf for 3 or 4 months until it's completely dry, and so we want to give it enough material so that if it warps and twists or whatever, we can put it back on the lathe and then re-round it again.

We want to have enough material so that we can do that, both on the inside and on the outside, We're going to use the Parting Tool here, and spin the bowl, and that's going to put a cut right in the Tenon, that's going to tell us where the bottom of the bowl is so that when we take a measurement this way, we'll know how far we have to the bottom of the bowl.

I know I want the bottom of the bowl to be about an inch thick , so I'll just come up an inch.

Yeah, it looks about right, and then I'll lock it into place, so now I can put this piece in the center here, and then again eyeball up and I can go about another inch and a half from the inside now.

I have a similar tool that I will use for the outside to sort of determine that inch too, and that's this big Caliper, and what this does is that I can push this on the bow here, and whatever the thickness is shows in between the points here.

We got about an inch and a half to go down into the center yet and then we'll play with the walls.

Then we'll put that Round Nose Scraper in there and kind of clean up those lines and that'll be this portion of the rough turning.

There, that looks a little cleaner.

Oh, there's our .. no, there's another knot, it doesn't show on the outside but it shows on the inside, we still got ..it looks like a little chainsaw mistake here, so I'm going to just bring this outside down.

I want to get it beneath this cut here.

The other thing I want to do is put a little curve, a little chamfer, on the corners here.

From what I've read, it sort of helps prevent cracking during the drying process.

I would call this bowl roughed out, and ready to dry.

We've got some weirdness going on there with a couple pieces but I can take it off of here so we have - that was that piece we saw on the outside, and then there's another piece that's not related to that one over on this side and it's got a little bit of rot in it too.

If I happen to notice pieces that look like it's cracking , or if there's something that's separating, I'll put a little bit of super glue on those pieces of wood before I let it dry, just to sort of bind it and hold it together.

The final process of this rough turn bowl is to dry it.

My teacher taught me that he uses an ethyl alcohol solution, a denatured alcohol, essentially grain alcohol, but they add some poison in it so you people don't drink it.

I've got a solution of that in here and so what I'm going to do is stick the bowl in this alcohol bath for a day.

I'm just going to let this sit, and the idea here is that the alcohol penetrates into the wood.

It dilutes the water, and then draws it out, so we'll let this sit for a day.

Tomorrow about this time, I'll pull it out and then I'll wrap this in a paper bag before that, I'll take away this, and take a reading on the moisture content, and put it up on the shelf.

Then every week or two weeks, I'll come back and check the weight again and check the moisture and when the bowl has stopped losing weight or it sort of settles in, then I'll have a good idea that it's done and it can be ready for finishing, Into the bath it goes and let it sit in there for a day.

Okay, through the magic of time travel, we are able to dry that bowl to a point where we can finish it.

Okay, actually this bowl, I did in March of this spring.

I've measured it and weighed it , it's ready to be finished.

I'll reattach it to the lathe so we can see when we spin this, we definitely got some wobble to it from the drying process, We're going to use the the tools again and just kind of go across the outside and do the inside and just bring it so it's all uniform once again.

All right, here we go.

I think I'm going to start out with the scraper and just see what that does for us.

At this point, you can be really thinking about the design elements.

You sort of set that stage when you were doing the roughing, but you have a little control over it at this point.

I'm going to use this bull scraper, and that kind of lets me get into the nooks and crannies a little bit.

We want to try to remove as much of the tool marks as we can because our next process is going to be sanding.

The less lines and tool marks there are, the easier the sanding will be.

Oh, I got plenty of room, so we can go probably down another 1/4 to 1/3 of an inch.

I have made the mistake before of going too far down, that's bad, and I was super bummed when I went too deep, so that's why I always check it with that depth gauge, and just kind of make sure I don't do that.

Let's do the same thing we just did on the outside with the inside, frequently stop and check.

If you get too narrow, you can ruin the piece at this point so we don't want to do that.

That gives us about a 1/4 inch to 1/3 inch thickness on the very bottom, which I'm happy with, but we're going to work on the sides a little bit.

As this outside part starts to get a little thinner, it's the wood itself, it's going to vibrate and it's going to do what they call "chatter" and you'll hear that kind of a scream a little bit.

Now we're going to be doing a lot of sanding on this, so I think I'm going to stop with about this thickness.

We'll continue removing material through sanding.

We have a lot of tool marks in here, I'm going to get out the scraper and try to remove those - just makes our sanding a little bit easier.

Now, the last thing I want to do is sort of ...the profile on the outside here is still a little wobbly from warping and we'll just sort of clean up the edge here.

At this point, I'll kind of look and make sure that no cracks have developed, especially around the lip.

This one looks really clean, looks really nice, the bottom seems pretty uniform.

This little center, there's a little nub right there in the middle, but we'll sand that off.

We are going to use an Orbit sander, and we're going to start with a 60 grit disc.

I love sanding.

During that process, everything starts to pop, I really enjoy that.

It can be a little tedious but I just daydream and let it go.

The sanding is complete on the little walnut bowl; so we went from 60 grit to 120 to 220 to 320 to 400 grit, and then we finished up with some steel wool and we got it pretty shiny.

This is without any finish on it, this is just basically the sanded and polished wood.

The last part of the sanding process is going to use some abrasive paste, and this is a mixture of mineral oil and diatomaceous earth.

We're just going to rub this into the wood and get it all juicy and let it sort of melt in there.

I am going to just turn the lathe on and use this other rag and sort of let the little dinosaurs do their work and this will really kind of shine up the wood and polish it up, The mineral oil in this will also seep into the wood and kind of help keep it from drying out, prevent it from continuing to dry out and crack.

I'm constantly learning, I didn't know about diatoms and waxes and all this stuff before I started doing this, and it's just been a lot of fun to research this and try out different formulas when I whip up these waxes and just kind of see how they react.

I think we got the inside pretty good, okay, so we're gonna do that same thing on the outside, we're just gonna rub in this abrasive paste and I'm just going to sort of hold this on here and let the friction of this paste do the work.

It gets hot, we've got the abrasive paste put on and taken off for the most part, and now we're going to put a finishing wax on it.

This is just a hard wax made out of beeswax, mineral oil, and that carnauba wax.

It likes to be put on warm, it sort of activates it and then when it cools, it forms this really hard shell almost, and that's kind of what we're going for, I'll let that harden a little bit, cool off, and then we'll start on the other side, but we're going to spin it the other direction.

You can see the oil melting and coming off the top of that.

All right, this bowl is almost done.

Now the next thing we have to do is remove it from the lathe, very close.

Okay, we've got that to 150 and then I'm going to do a 200, but what I like to do while I'm doing that, is get my brand ready, Literally, a brand.

we're going to heat this up and usually by the time I get done with the 200 grit sand, the brand is hot enough to use.

Let's kind of find the center.

Perfect.

For the most part, this is just sealing the wood, and sort of moisturizing that burn.

There is our bowl, Scott!

I'm just starting out on this so I don't need to be fancy right now, I just need to practice my skills, the basics, and this is more than enough for me to do that.

Thank you for watching.

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Production funding of Common Ground was made possible, in part, by First National Bank Bemidji, continuing their 2nd century of service to the community.

Member FDIC.

Common Ground is brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people.

November 4th, 2008.

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