The Woodshop Shed

Burmese Lidded Bowl

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


This lidded bowl was an adventure and had quite a few lessons for me.
It started out as a great piece of spalted ash. I was really focused on the form and the raised band with the grooves. I was very pleased with the form and I had a dovetail recess cut in the bottom that I used to hold the piece in the jaws of my lathe chuck. The spalting had weakened that part of the bowl and it broke the recess. I reverse mounted the bowl between a jamb chuck and live center and cut the recess again, that changed the geometry of the bowl. It broke again.My solution was to epoxy a piece of ash onto the bottom. This let me reshape the bowl back to the original geometry that I really liked. It is the same ash I used on the lid. I used some new techniques to turn the new bottom and lid. Also this bowl had a few voids that I filled with two tones of mica and epoxy. The finial (also new to me) is from mesquite. I used many new techniques and was glad to salvage the piece. It ended up being a series of very spontaneous solutions.The finish is a couple of sealcoats of shellac sanded to 320#. That was followed by two coats of amber shellac that I burnished into the piece. I used Howard's Feed and Wax applied and buffed out for the final part of the finish.I would normally not try to salvage a piece like this but the spalted ash is beautiful and I really wanted to try out a few methods of chucking up elements of the bowl. I was able to use double sided tape to adhere the lid and the bottom to a wooden faceplate to cut them round and make the recess for the chuck.I had a really good time and I'm relatively happy with this Frankenstein Monstered lidded bowl.
As usual, questions and comments welcome.

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