Richard_C
Established Member
The story
A friend gave me a length of "mahogany" (of some kind) c. 40 mm thick, 250 w and 1m long found in his deceased fathers garage when he was clearing out. It must have been over 40 years old and he thinks it might have come back from the USA after his father returned from a few years working there. It has some cracks. I set out to make a bowl as a thank you and found it horrid to turn, dusty, blunts tools and turns sandpaper smooth in moments. I did get a result but it's not that satisfactory.
I had another go, a smaller piece avoiding imperfections and have now done the outside of a shallow 150mm dia bowl. By spinning it fast, light cuts and sharpening often I got a decent finish off the tool. Looking at the end grain the pores are very visible, and even on some of the cross grain there are odd lines where a pore happened to be at the surface.
How do people here set about finishing that sort of wood?
I don't much want to invest in different colours of grain filler and to be honest if it wasn't a special situation it would have gone into the stove a long time ago. My initial thought is to clean it with meths to get rid of embedded dust, then apply danish oil followed by microcrystalline wax like I normally do. But I thought I would ask here first.
A friend gave me a length of "mahogany" (of some kind) c. 40 mm thick, 250 w and 1m long found in his deceased fathers garage when he was clearing out. It must have been over 40 years old and he thinks it might have come back from the USA after his father returned from a few years working there. It has some cracks. I set out to make a bowl as a thank you and found it horrid to turn, dusty, blunts tools and turns sandpaper smooth in moments. I did get a result but it's not that satisfactory.
I had another go, a smaller piece avoiding imperfections and have now done the outside of a shallow 150mm dia bowl. By spinning it fast, light cuts and sharpening often I got a decent finish off the tool. Looking at the end grain the pores are very visible, and even on some of the cross grain there are odd lines where a pore happened to be at the surface.
How do people here set about finishing that sort of wood?
I don't much want to invest in different colours of grain filler and to be honest if it wasn't a special situation it would have gone into the stove a long time ago. My initial thought is to clean it with meths to get rid of embedded dust, then apply danish oil followed by microcrystalline wax like I normally do. But I thought I would ask here first.
