Turned a new Aspen Burl
I just completed the 10 day Art Along the Lake Studio Tour and had over 200 visitors and sold a lot of bowls. I am finally getting back turning which feels really good. An artist is most happy producing new art and not selling art, although it was great fun meeting the many interested people during the art show. I dragged out a medium sized (15" across) aspen burl shown in the first image below. This burl is one of the more tricky ones to turn since it wrapped only part way around the log. I always want a complete bark edge which limits the possibilities. So, I decided to turn two smaller bowls from this burl. The bark is thick and jagged so the bowls should have great natural edges. If you look carefully in the first image you will see two nails coming out of the right and left parts of the burl. These mark the vertical axes of the two bowls with the heads of the nails indicating the tops of the bowls. I cut the burl into two halves along the blue line in image one and trimmed each into bowl blanks shown in image 2. Image 3 shows the bowl blank on the left mounted on my lathe. The final two images (4 and 5) show the bowls made from these two bowl blanks. The bowl on the right came from the bowl blank shown in image 3. These bowls have spectacular bark edges and nice colors and figuring. This burl had a very large dark cambium layer between the bark and the solid wood. This area was soft and spongy and had to be stabilized with a lot of thin CA glue. I applied the CA many times during the hollowing to make sure the bark did not fly off. This process took a long time. These aspen burl bowls are each about 7.5" in diameter and doon't show all this extra work. The end result is nice and well worth the effort.
