Apprenticeship day 2

In January I wrote about Jed Malcore and me being chosen to work together for the Craft Apprentice Program (CAP). We were to start our program on March 1st and run through the month of September. However sometimes life has other ideas. On March 1st there was a patch of ice, a slip and fall and the result was a broken thumb for Jed. Fast forward through a surgery and four pins being placed and later pulled. So we got started on May 10th, a little behind but we have plenty of time to get it done. 

Day 1 was actually done while Jed had a cast on and watching me do the work. The first part of our CAP is to work on bowls so we got started on what to look for before we take the chainsaw to a log. We talked about what kind of bowl we could get and where it would come from on the log. We also talked about how the heart of the tree affects the growth rings that we can see in our bowls and how to manipulate the bowl blank for the designs that we are working on. 

Jed using an electric chainsaw to cut bowl blank to length

Day 2 - the pins have been removed and Jed is out of the cast and able to work the wood and turn! We went back over the same basics but with Jed running everything. We added in the placement of the bowl gouge during roughing cuts and pulling and pushing cuts. We roughed out the outside of the bowl blank and got it ready to core out smaller bowls from the inside of the largest bowl blank. 

Oneway Stronghold chuck with Oneway 3 inch chuck spur drive

Pictured above is the Oneway Stronghold chuck with #4 jaws on it and Oneway's 3 inch chuck spur drive. I use the spur drive so that I don't have to remove my chuck. I can insert the spur drive into the jaws of the chuck and hold my block of wood between centers. Once I've found the center on the block of wood I use a 1 1/6 inch spade bit in a hand drill to drill a hole about 1 inch deep. Often times when we mount these pieces of wood to the lathe they weigh somewhere between 75 to 150 pounds, depending upon the size of wood that we are about to rough out. This way I can slide the drilled out hole over the spur center and then bring up the tailstock to hold it in place. It may not be perfectly aligned in the hole but it's close enough for the rough turning that I'm about to do. 

Roughed out bowl blank ready for coring

In the picture above you can see the roughed out Birdseye Maple bowl blank that is now ready for coring. Coring is the process of taking smaller bowl blanks out of the larger bowl blank. That way we don't turn all of the wood in the center of the largest bowl blank into shavings on the shop floor. Also notice in the picture that the bowl blank is not flat going across the face but rather has steps to it. Ideally the largest bowl blank would be on the outside and it would also be the deepest. However there was a crack going on the largest blank that doesn't seem to affect the inner bowl blanks as much. So we turned away the crack and this will yield us the same amount of bowl blanks but the inner blanks will be a little deeper than they would be if we turned the blank flat across the face. 

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