Somewhere along the line, I picked up a piece of catalpa that had some burl and a “damaged” spot in it. In all honesty, I don’t remember where I got it (most likely someone gave it to me) but I do remember cutting the piece of wood in half and thinking I could make two bowls out of it. I also remember mixing and pouring the resin into each of the two blanks. One of the blanks, I remember starting to turn and the other I took to a friend’s house to turn, but then we made other projects and it sat. Covid hit, and it was left untouched for over a year.

As I was moving some things around in the shop, I found the first of the two bowls stashed in a box. What was odd, was it was completely turned, had been fully sanded, but it still had the tenon on, which is the last step in finishing a bowl. Weird! I kept looking at the bowl, trying to remember why I hadn’t taken that last step, but kept coming up blank. Was I going to burn something on it? No, that would conflict with the epoxy. Was there a spot that needed “fixed” before removing the tenon? No, I looked it all over and everything looked fine. I sat it on a table next to my lathe, so every time I went to turn, I had to looks at it. I figured it would either jolt my mind back to the initial reason, or it would force me to make a different decision on how to proceed.

After having this bowl taunt me for about 6 months, I finally gave up on whatever my initial thought may have been and decided to forget the past and start over. I decided that it was too thick, so I put it on the lathe, reduced all surfaces by at least half, sanded everything again, and took off the tenon before I could talk myself into doing anything more with it.

All things considered, this is a pretty nice bowl! Catalpa is a very soft wood and this blank was completely dry, so this thing weighs next to nothing. There was also VERY little distortion since the first turning was done, so doing the finishing work was really, really easy.

Here’s the finished product. Now to start work on the other piece of that blank. It’ll be coming, soon…