Lately, and I have yet to figure out the cause, other turners have been giving me pieces of wood to turn. I suspect it’s a combination of things. Maybe it’s pity because I don’t have my shop up and running (yet). Maybe it’s because they know that in the move I had to “dispose” of a large cache of wood that I had been storing. Maybe they’re just being nice. Maybe they’re getting rid of bad blanks they don’t want anymore. What I do know is that I’ve been truly thankful for each and every piece, regardless of the species or the condition of the blank. It’s good to have friends!

At the May meeting, a fellow turner, club member, and friend gave me a chunk of redwood, saying that he wasn’t going to be able to turn it. (His story to tell, so I won’t put it here!) I didn’t know much about redwood, other than when I was a kid my father used it to replace some wood pieces on the facia of the house. He claimed it wouldn’t rot out, no matter how wet it got. Judging by the work it took to replace those panels a couple years later after they had rotted, I’m gonna claim he was an idiot. All I remember about the wood itself was it had a reddish color, which certainly wasn’t like any of the typical wood I’d seen running through the timber. Russell was very open about the condition of the blank, and pointed out that in the years it had been in his shop, it has completely dried and had a couple of hairline cracks that had developed on one end. It also had a single spot near the edge that looked like the tree had suffered a trauma at some point and left a scar that would likely be very weak..

I started at a friend’s shop by making a circular blank, which removed 90% of the cracks and even got rid of the bad spot that could be seen. SUCCESS! Turning this would be the easiest thing, ever, right? Well, yes and no. Redwood, as I quickly found out, is very soft, which means it turns quickly and doesn’t take much “muscle” to shape. It is so soft that the tools just want to dig in like a starving man at a buffet. After making several uneven cuts that left the outside of the bowl extremely uneven, I conceded this project was going to require finesse!

The outside was finished and I quickly moved on to working on the inside of the bowl. As I got deeper and deeper, a little brown spot started to appear near the center. Not that big at first, but enough that it would make a darker circle in the wood as the lathe was spinning. I slowed down, but with each pass, the line got bigger until a second blemish in the wood, nearly identical to the one I had removed, appearedand that it was going to be right at the bottom on the bowl. It was also clear that in the many years this tree had grown since whatever injury was done, the wood had become unstable, leaving a literal hole in the wood. bummer! I cleaned up, brought the piece home, and tried to decide what options existed for fixing the problem.

Using two part epoxy didn’t work, because A) it was shiny, which looked out of place and B) it fell out almost immediately because the surrounding wood was too weak to hold the epoxy in place. I ended up deciding to leave it in, since any other inlay would likely result in the same failure. Initially, I dyed the bowl red, thinking a redwood bowl should look, well, red. I wasn’t counting on it looking orange, though, which is what color came out after the brown-ness of the redwood took the dye. ick! Most of the red was sanded off, then I put on a coat of black dye, let it dry, and started sanding it back. My hope was that it would accentuate the grain, but I hadn’t expected the bowl to warp as much as it did from the moisture in the dyes. What I was left with was an uneven blackening of the bowl that would be impossible to fully sand. In the end, I left the black and put two layers of red over the top. I figure if anyone says anything about the splotchy blackness of the piece or the (now gaping) black hole at the bottom, I’d just tell them the wood might have been salvaged from the rubble of a small millwright’s store run by Chinese immigrants that was lost in the great San Francisco fire. Or, it might be that I should have thought about what the final look was going to be before I started the finishing process…

Thank you, Russell, for the blank. I hope I did it justice!