So I tried messing around with epoxy putty.  If you’ve hung out with plumbers, you might have seen this stuff.  “Plumber’s putty” is available at the local hardware in the plumbing section.  Not very original name and it only comes in a drab gray color, but I supposed it serves the intended purpose.  When they two parts of putty are kneaded together, you can shape it like clay, but when it dries it is like a hard plastic.  Pretty cool stuff!  I’ve seen videos where people use epoxy putty to inlay designs in bowls and it looked really easy.  That should have been a warning!  The stuff is almost gooey when you work with it and really doesn’t WANT to be put in little channels on a bowl.  I found a company out of England that sells a version called “Milliput” that comes in yellow (when I say yellow, think a really ugly shade of grayish-yellow.  Like sinus infection in a toddler, yellow), white, black, or terracotta.  I ordered some of each, just to see what it would do.  Since I have the patience and attention span of a gnat, I got tired of waiting on the slow boat from London and went to Hobby Lobby looking for something similar that I could use right now.  Guess what?   They carry Milliput, but only the ugly yellow and the white.  I bought the white, thinking I could dye it some other color.  Then I looked to the right and there was a whole display of liquid dyes that were supposedly made to be used to color epoxy.  I’m pretty sure I heard angels sing for just a little bit.

I bought a bottle of “fire engine red” and went home to create red stripes around the rim of a cherry bowl.  What I quickly realized when I started coloring the putty, was someone at the dye factory has apparently never seen a fire engine in their entire life, is color blind, or is still laughing about the practical joke he played on everyone who bought this stuff.  After adding almost an entire bottle of the coloring to the white putty, I figured the color I had was the color I was always going to have.  This is what I was left with:

What the hell am I supposed to do with this???  Note to the color blind guy in the factory: that’s pink, not red!  Fire engines are NOT this color, because aside from a few parades in the San Francisco area, every kid expects to see an actual red fire engine.  Dalmation’s “pop” when sitting on a big RED fire engine, they just look annoyed and a little embarrassed sitting on something this color.  How about you call what you put in the bottle “Pepto Bismol”, “Baby Bop’s belly”, or “Barbie’s dream house” so the buyer would know what they were getting?  Fire engine red by ass!

Maybe I’ll just hold on to it for awhile and then try to donate it to some kind of breast cancer awareness raffle, where I can act like I did this on purpose…

July 31st -lazy Sunday.   Since today was the last day of July and last night was another overnight implementation at work, I figured I should finish up some projects that have been cluttering up my shop.   The first focus was to make a couple of bowls for a collaboration with a woman I work with. She is a basket weaver, and a damn good  one at that.   She actually went to school for the craft.  (No jokes about majoring in basket weaving!)  I made two perfectly good bowls out of white oak, then cut them them in half  with the band saw. Then, where the cut was made, I made a groove. If all goes according to plan, she will be able to weave the two bowls back together, using the groove I made to anchor the weaving.  The end result should be a long oblong dish like thing that would make a really good bread basket. I thought I could cut the groove using a router table or a palm router, but I couldn’t figure out anyway to get it consistent and there’s not a lot of space to work with, so any slip up would be catastrophic!  I ended up cutting the grooves freehand. Let’s hope it works! Here’s a couple pictures just to see “the before”.

Stay tuned!  When the weaver lady finishes, I’ll post pictures of what the final product looks like.

July 8th – Ready to serve it up!  The turning club’s next challenge is to make a platter.  Not a whole lot of difference between making a bowl and a platter (or plate), the technique is the same.  All that really changes, is the size.  Getting the flat spots and the curvy parts to be consistent across something 14″ wide  is a tricky at best.

At least 5 years ago, someone gave me three walnut boards that had been glued together.  It was a cut off from some project he had done, and since I didn’t know what I was doing back then, I threw it up on a shelf with some other wood and forgot about it.  When I went looking for “platter wood” to use for the challenge, I realized  it was big enough that I could start with a blank that was 15″ wide and about two inches thick. Here’s my entry into the competition.  Not bad for a first effort on something this wide and this shallow!  Many thanks to Bob for the use of his big lathe, I couldn’t have done this on my little Jet.  I’m getting closer and closer to the day when I can rebuild a shop that actually has the right tools and enough space to use them!

Since the homemade vacuum chamber I tried to make last month was such a bust, I broke down and bought one online.  Luckily, our Chinese friends that make Harbor Freight look expensive have many ebay stores!  I picked up a system that has a 5 gallon stainless steel pot, a small vacuum pump, and all the hardware for about a hundred bucks.  WORKS LIKE A DREAM!!!  The best stuff to use to stabilize half rotten wood is something called “Cactus Juice”, but you pretty much have to sell a kidney to be able to afford it.  Since I want to stabilize bowls, not tiny little pen blanks, I might also have to give up a lung to afford enough juice to cover the entire bowl while it’s in the vacuum chamber.  After many hours surfing the net, I discovered that any polyurethane based finish can be used, it just takes longer for the liquid to soak into the wood and longer for it to dry.  After some creative use of rocks, towels and Wal-Mart bags to cut down on the amount of poly necessary to submerge the bowl blank, I managed to get one gallon of poly to cover the whole blank.  When it was done, I put the wet blanks into the kiln and ran it at about 120 degrees overnight to help the poly cure.  In hindsight, I should have left it soak in the poly for a day or so after the bubbles stopped coming out with the vacuum pump turned on, then cooked it for more like a week.  I’ll also try thinning the liquid down a little bit so that it absorbs into the wood better.  Here’s a picture of the inaugural test run:

The bowls that I used were the “mystery wood” blanks that I talked about last month.  Here are two of the four bowls that were retrieved from Chris’ rotten tree and were put through the vacuum stabilizer.  This is the final product of the rough out that was in last month’s post.

Here are two pictures of the second bowl.  This one was from the same tree, but further away from the woodpecker attack, so the wood isn’t nearly as bad and didn’t require as much time in the tank to stabilize.  Top view:

Side view:

There are two additional blanks that have been stabilized, waiting to turn, so stay tuned…