The Woodshop Shed

Wild Cherry Gall Bowl

Furnished content.
(from Lumberjocks.com)


With decent temperatures and little rain finally gracing Michigan, I was able to truly get back to my woodworking roots. I started woodworking last June when I quit drinking. I found burls and galls while I was fly fishing, and I started grinding them into bowls. I worked exclusively in bowls until… probably my first clock.Obviously I got obsessed with clocks for awhile there, but now the winter is over. I'm not confined to the garage anymore. For obvious reasons, I can't run the grinder in the garage. Grinding out a bowl kicks up copious sawdust. The garage would be 20 times worse than it already is with sawdust if I did any extensive grinding.In any case, now that I can work in the backyard again, I'm back to bowls for a bit. Most of my burls and galls are pretty cut up from me finding clock faces in them. However, I had one gall that was untouched and looked perfectly suited to be a little bowl.So, I went to work. I used my grinder to grind out the declivity of the bowl. Then I used the grinder to go down through the layers of the gall that would be the outside of the bowl. Grinding until patterns began to emerge, I then switched over to 40 grit paper. After the 40, I went 80, 120, 180, and then 240 grit. It's finished in about 6 coats of wipe-on poly.So you can get an idea as to size, a soft ball would fit in this bowl just about perfectly.As it turns out, I wasn't working alone on this piece. Even though they didn't come out when I used a pruning saw to trim the ends, the ants swarmed as I made passes with the grinder. You can easily see evidence of ant tunnels on this bowl, but I really like the way that looks.It's funny. I thought all the ants were gone when I was finished grinding and sanding. But then, when I put on the poly, about another 100 ants swarmed out of the tunnels. I couldn't believe how many ants were in this thing. I must have picked up this piece dozens of times, but not once did I see an ant. Maybe they were still a little winter slow or something.In any case, it felt really good to get back to my bowls. I really like how this one turned out!

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