The next project in the woodworking class was a bowl made out of a solid block of wood. Full disclosure: it wasn't my favorite project. We started with a block of oak, and using ring-shaped plastic guides that we taped to the top, we used the band saw to cut the edges to a rounded shape and mark out the interior edges of the bowl. Then we used a large cutter bit on the drill press to scoop out the largest chunks that we could. Because you can't really overlap well with those large bits (or it skitters away - it's not a fun discovery), after that it was using the hand router to dig out the rest of the wood. The hand router gets sawdust pretty much everywhere. With good reason, our teacher warned us to wear clothes we didn't mind getting really dusty. Amid hand routering, I managed to ding up the plastic ring in some routing failure, so I could not use the ring as an edge all that well, and also I forgot to do a few laps to make sure I got everything at that level before adjusting the router for a different depth, the end result was that I had some lumps in the interior wall. Oops.
At the next class, having already used the hand router to scoop out most of the innards of the bowl, we popped off the plastic ring and used the table router to round the edges of the bottom, top outside, and (most exciting, since you are working blind) top inside of the bowl. And then there was sanding using the belt sander at first (which unfortunately introduced cross grain lines, so another imperfection to sand down) and then the hand orbital sanders on those areas that were accessible, and hand sanding the inside of the bowl. By the time I got to that, I had a lot of weirdness to try to sand down into something relatively normal looking. For a time, I thought I would take it home and sand it more on my own, but after a point, I got over that, so when we got to the finishing time, I slathered it in walnut oil, and called it good. In the end, while it's got issues, most people aren't going to see them in the detail that I did. I took it home and popped it into use as a catchall for keys and it's ended up being remarkably handy.
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| The bowl in its finished form |
