Bowls for awards
Back in the spring I was contacted about making a series of shallow bowls to be used as awards for a tennis tournament. We ironed out the details and just had to wait and see if the rules in our state would allow the tournament to take place in August.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!I knew that I was going to have to turn, engrave, paint and finish 32 bowls in about 3 weeks time. No problem, he says. What could go wrong, he says. Actually I welcomed the change and challenge.
These were all going to be approximately 6 inches in diameter and about 3/4 inch high. Sixteen of them were only going to have laser engraving and the other sixteen were going to have laser engraving and air brushing the design in the center.
I started out by acquiring 5/4″ Maple wood boards about 8 inches wide. We went to Rugby down in Gorham, Maine. It was my first time doing business with them and Scott and Steve were great to deal with and they have a nice selection of wood on hand. Steve even cut the boards down to fit into the car. Get on Steve’s email list and he will send you his monthly specials.
Once I got the wood home I planed one face flat on my planer. Normally I wouldn’t do this but I figured that by doing this I could hold the bowls on my lathe using my vacuum system while I turned the bottom and it would be quicker than if I tried to do it any other way. After planing one face I proceed to layout 34 (I decided to make 2 additional bowls just in case) 6 1/2 inch circles on the boards and then cut them all out on the band saw.
Once they were all cut, I proceeded to turn the outside of the bowls using the 5 1/2 inch drum chuck on my Oneway vacuum system and it worked out great and saved a lot of time. I also sanded and added a little texture to the whole outside of the bowls using my Sorby texturing tool. My thought was that it would add some character to the plain Maple. Jazz it up a little. In hind sight I should have skipped this and I’ll explain why later.
Next I flipped the bowls around and turned the inside of the bowls, sanded and textured this side as well. Again using the vacuum system. Normally I wouldn’t texture the whole outside of the bowl when I was going to use the vacuum to hold the bowl for turning the inside. I would texture a ring anywhere from 3/4 inch to 1 1/14 inch wide and just make sure it wasn’t where the vacuum needed to seal onto the bowl but I had experimented with a light texturing and the vacuum held just fine.
My next step was to engrave all of the bowls. On the 16 with just engraving, they would be ready for finish right after I engraved them. One of the problems that I encountered was that my laser engraver is old enough that it doesn’t have a camera in it to help you find the center of what you plan to engrave. That meant that I had to find the center of all of the bowls and be accurate doing it. Also because each bowl was of a slightly different size (they varied by as much as 3/16 inch, not a lot but enough so that it would be very noticeable once engraved) so I couldn’t make a jig to use. I had to measure each one and I took great pains to get this right. I didn’t measure each one after they were engraved but the ones that I did measure were all within a 32nd of an inch of being centered. I considered that a victory.
There were 16 that I was going to have to air brush. On those I sprayed a Minwax matte polyurethane on the inside of the bowl so that the airbrushing couldn’t bleed into the grain. I cut and put on a product called frisket. It’s something that you can use while airbrushing to mask an area that you don’t want to directly paint or to protect an area from over spray. One side is sticky, very similar to painters tape, and the other side is similar to vinyl. You can also cut through it and peel it back to spray a design in a certain area while protecting the surrounding area. My plan was to use the laser to cut through the frisket and then mask off the rest of the bowl and peel back the areas that I wanted to apply the paint to.
Here is where the light texturing that I added to the bowls reared its head for the first time. The frisket left very tiny gaps between the texturing. Not huge but enough so that on the first one some spray got up underneath the frisket. Okay plan B. I ended up adding blue painters tape along the engraving lines to block the gaps and then I was able to peel the frisket back to paint the areas green and that solved that problem. However it did mean about 2 hours of carefully taping the bowls. Then I airbrushed all 16 taped up pieces with my Iwata Hi-Line CH airbrush. I own several Iwata airbrushes and I can’t say enough good about them. The Hi-Line was my first one and is still my go to airbrush for most of my projects.
When I got them all done and sprayed the top, one last time, with the polyurethane is when I noticed the texturing for the second time. The texturing was light enough that it looked like very consistent swirl sanding marks but deeper. There wasn’t anything that I could do about it now but for another time I will leave off the texturing.
Below are a couple fun pictures for you. I mean, if you’ve read this far you deserve something, right?
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