Making, Crafting, Creating... aka Whatcha workin' on?

There is that - I do enjoy just drawing/making for its own sake sometimes. I play music for the same reason; I don’t want to be a Rock Star Artist, but creating keeps me sane.

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Thanks! :slight_smile:

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Following advice and spruiking my bowls on social media…

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Made a carpenter’s mallet to go with the chisels:

It’s half-dry Sydney Bluegum, so it’s got a lot of mass to it. This is good; it means that when you’re working at odd angles, just a tiny backhand tap is enough to drive the chisel.

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So if you don’t have a 4 cm dick, you can buy one.

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Today’s practice spoon, work in progress:

That’s had an hour or so of carving; still plenty of whittling to go.

Edit:

Whittle, whittle, whittle.

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Gradually refining the spooncarving:

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Cow tools.

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The three stages of proto-spoons:

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Just sold this one…

Jacaranda.

Edit: First international sale, too. My little bowl is headed all the way to Florida.

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Every time I see a roughly-carved spoon I think of this:

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For me, it’s:

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Maybe there is hope for Florida Man after all…

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If you ever get bored of bowls:

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I want this.

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https://www.tischlerei-wolsegger.at

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I love everything about this chair.

Through the form of the guest is formally wrapped with the ethereal scents of the local stone pine.
The scent has a particularly beneficial and beneficial effect on our circulation and sleep.
It improves the recovery phase, causes a lower heart rate, stabilizes the circulatory system.
Last but not least: it also smells very good !!
However, it is also possible to make the “pine wellness oasis” in any wood!
Also the installation of loudspeakers for music sprinkling or LED lighting is possible.

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I’m inordinately smug about a minor bit of repair work. I had a pair of over the ear bluetooth headphones with a badly buzzing speaker. So I opened it up, removed the speaker, measured the impedance, and found a match in my stash of dead and dying corded headphones. Solder and hot glue later…good as new! I’m a professional craftsman who usually does far more difficult stuff, but this bit of salvage tickles me, probably because it justifies my cheapness and packrat tendencies.

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Camphor Laurel fruitbowl.

This one was an epic adventure…

The socket mount that I’d carved into the base cracked while I was hollowing the bowl, but held together just well enough to let me finish. But when it came time to turn it around and clean up the base, things went haywire.

The timber was already a bit difficult to cut, as it came from a tree fork and had grain going in all directions. But it was complicated by the fact that the bowl was too big for the smaller Longworth chuck, so I had to use the really big one. Which is so big that it requires you to swivel the lathe head 90° away from the bed to gain extra clearance.

This means that you can’t use the tailstock to stabilise the work, and a Longworth chuck only holds it via a collection of rubber feet rather than a solid mount.

Anyway, the cracks in the base meant that it had a tendency to catch during cutting, which can overpower the ability of the rubber feet to maintain their grip. It was bad enough that I called in my Dad to do it for me; I didn’t think that I could manage it without disaster.

Dad did well; he made it 90% of the way through before it caught hard enough to rip the bowl from the mount, bounce it off his head, and send it spinning at 600rpm into the rafters of the shed.

Which left me with a bowl with a messy base, chipped rim, and rubber skidmarks on the sides. Plus a slightly bruised and dazed Dad.

Fortunately, wood is forgiving. A bit of time on the planer to clean up the mess on the base, a bit of work with sandpaper and wax and all is good again.

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