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Ben’s Birthday Bowl

My nephew Ben just turned 2, so he gets a bowl of his own. This one is from a piece of walnut that I got at the raffle at one of my local turning club’s meetings. I’ve been mulling over making a bowl with a turned handle and decided this would be the first. It’s definitely not the last.

This was the first stage of turning. The block is roughly profiled with the bandsaw, and here I’m creating the tenon, which is the dovetail-shaped foot on the bottom which I’ll use later to hold the bowl in the chuck, and the rough shape of the outside bottom of the bowl.  The bowl is being driven by a flat plywood disc mounted on a faceplate and covered in non-skid padding, and held in place with the tailstock.

The next step was turning the handle. Since I wanted the handle to tip upward slightly, I had to tilt the turning axis accordingly. In this photo the handle end is on the right and the bowl is right-side-up. You can see the slight angle of the axis that the handle will be turned on. For this stage the bowl is held between centers.

Here the handle is shaped partway.

With the handle shaped, it’s time to define the margins of the carved band that the handle sticks out of. Here you can see that there’s about 1/4″ of that band below the handle.

And here that material has been trimmed to within about 1/16″ of the bottom of the handle.

I reversed the bowl, gripping the tenon in the chuck, and defined the top rim of the bowl and the top edge of the band. My goal at this point is to get the 2 outside curves (above and below the band) to look like a single continuous curve.

Back to the bandsaw to remove the big chunks of extra wood around the band.

The lathe makes a really effective carving clamp if you use the locking screw they provide (protruding vertically from the yellow cowling of the headstock) to lock the spindle in place. I’m using a #7 gouge to texture the band.

The carving and the handle end are complete.

Time to hollow the inside of the bowl.

Et voila! Inside and top rim (down to the band on the outside), sanded.

The last phase is to flip the bowl onto a vacuum chuck, turn the foot and get rid of the tenon, sand the bottom half, and it’s all over but the oiling.

I’ll add a couple more pictures of this one completed tomorrow, then it’s off to the birthday party!

Another view of the finished bowl.

And here’s the birthday boy himself!