Poplar bowl

Poplar (quaking aspen, popple) bowl (7 1/4″  x  3″) finished with beeswax, carnuba wax and mineral oil

The green “accent” lines are likely seaweed that had soaked into the wood. Or possibly some type of marine bacterium.

The surface came out perfectly smooth after sanding – surprising given the fuzzy mess that I started with.

Intermediate stages. The log (see below) had been in salt water at Sprauges Beach, Islesboro, ME  for who knows how long – drifting in and out with the tide, and was very wet and very soft. This picture shows it after I tried turn it and had given up. I started turning it in August 2011; it was soaking wet and there was so much tear-out that it seemed impossible to deal with. So it was chucked in the burn pile. And this week-end (May 4th, 2012), I decided to have another go at it. It seemed to have lost several pounds of water and was now  very light. And you can see in the pictures above that it turned out amazingly well. This is the log I started with (I had thought it was beech when I found it)

I cut a slot in the top (this was before chain saw) about an inch deep

and drove three wedges into it.

and got a pretty good split right down the middle. Lucky, I think, given the branch sticking out the side.

The end on view looked like it might have some promising figure.

Drilled a 3/8″ hole and

inserted a wormwood screw

Mounted it on the lathe to find the center and the removed the wormwood screw and cut it into a roughly circular cross section on the bandsaw. Put the wormwood screw back in and turned it to get the piece shown above.

Actually, it was so soggy that the wormwood screw stripped out its hole. That’s when I gave up and sent it to the burn pile. In the end I turned it between centers to cleanup the outside and cut a tenon on the bottom, mounted it in the 4 jaw chuck and then scooped out the inside and trimmed the top edge. I finished the bottom flat after reverse mounting it in the Cole chuck.