Project Working Idea

Cold rotten day in the wood shop

Hi Everyone,
Well, if you live in Minnesota you that today is a cold day and as my shop isnt heated, its like working in Dantes frozen hell. Wow, its cold down there.

Anyway in spite of the cold I went down to work on the locust bowl and a new piece out of myrtle wood.

Disasters, both of them.

The locust bowl is meant to be a gift for a good friend of mine who is an ardent coffee drinker so I made the box larger than the tea boxes I usually make. The turning of that went well and the wood dried with only a little distortion. It only needed a top and it would be done.

Well I made the top out of some clear pine because I thought the vanilla color of the pine would contrast well with the locust wood bottom.  To make a long story short, it looks like a giant pancake sitting on top of the locust bowl. Heres a photo:


Crappy design.

I decided to stop turning it and just to look at it a day or two to see if it can be salvaged so I took it off the lathe and started working on the myrtle wood box.

I began the myrtle box last week. It was a small square piece of wood that I turned down into a cylinder and then I rounded the edges. After about 30 minutes worth of work it looked like a roll of toilet paper (and I will spare you a photograph of that).  So I set that aside and later in the week decided to reshape it and add a lid out of red birch. After about an hour of turning, shaping, and sanding I now have a myrtle wood box that looks like a hand grenade:


...and after all that work, the lid is too loose. <sigh>

So I took a long look at the pancake and the hand grenade together:




...and decided it was time to go upstairs, have some hot soup, take a warm shower and warm up, and go watch a David Lean movie.

Tomorrows another day.  Thank heavens.

More tomorrow,
VW