xy mosian":1j8rxk3n said:
A Fruit Bowl carved from a piece of Sycamore felled in my garden earlier this year.
devonwoody":1j8rxk3n said:
I like it and very interesting, how did you go about carving the bowl, any details would be interesting?
Hi DW,
This was made from a half of the largest lump of a Sycamore I had felled earlier this year. Cut, not quite down the middle, by hand. Then of course what to make with it. I have never carved a large bowl, never had a lump this size to work with before. Some years ago, at a woodworking show, I picked up an Ashley Iles gouge number 31, about 19mm I think. That was from the 'reduced price' box with no handle. A confession, I bought it because it looked as if it wood be useful, and it is a glorious shape
. Apparently their quality control were not satisfied with it and so would not sell it complete as first quality. I can find nothing amiss and saved about a fiver when I had bought a handle as well. Here was my chance, basically I chisel carved a parallel flat on the outer curved surface to act as base and set to work on the sawn surface with the No. 31. The wood was spitting at me as I chopped away but the gouge certainly took some welly, enough that the box head on my mallet split anyway. The rectangular shape was the biggest I could get out of the half log, I went as deep as I dared, to a bottom thickness of 10mm, or there abouts. As with planing I smoothed out the crests between the grooves with flatter sweep gouges. I cut the outside with a hand saw, sorry Mike, and roughly finished the corners with gouges and spokeshaves.
By then I was getting to a stage that would be easier with drier wood. I left it alone for about 6 weeks, weighing it weekly. Once the weight seemed to have stabilised I set about finishing it. Again gouges, with smaller, finer cuts, a block plane and scrapers. Using thumb planes did cross my mind but I felt there were too many changes of curvature at the inside corners. It was difficult at the rim going across the grain, this broke up rather than cutting well. Eventually I made up some shellac sanding sealer and that sorted the problem. Using the sealer all over gave me much better finishing all round, I re-learn something too often these days.
The final finish is sanding sealer followed by a chilled beeswax. Swmbo is happy with her new fruit bowl, I am happy with a carved piece which is part of the, short, history of our occupation here.
Thanks for asking.
xy
The image is taken from a pdf of the Ashly Iles catalogue, I hope they don't mind. The catalogue has some interesting pages about their manufacturing process and can be found here:-
http://www.ashleyiles.co.uk/ashley_iles_catalogue.html
