Making a Wood Bowl with Resin Accents

This is Laguna's 1216 lathe. There's been a lot of talk about this I've seen online and give us a little bit of an overview here, John, what do you got? Oh, this machine has so many bells and whistles. It's an excellent machine for us and I probably couldn't do it in five minutes. So we should probably just get one back to your shop. I have to get a new lathe at my shop, oh no, what am I going to do? All right, obviously we knew that it was coming. Next thing we're going to do is do some turning on this lathe. This is going to be so much fun. I'm really lucky to have Jess Crow in my shop. And we're going to collaborate on a project. We're going to start with a maple blank. Jess show 'em where we're going to end up. Then we are going to make this It's too cool for school. So I'm going to turn a bowl. Jess is the resin gal, so she's going to resin the middle. So for the bowl, what do you need me to do in order for you to have something to work with? So I need you to take this and make me about a 14 inch bowl. It needs to have shallow walls and approximately a six inch diameter by eighth to quarter inch recess in the center. That's my favorite subject at school. Recess? Oh yeah. I bet, you're still in school. All right. Well, I'm going to have it for the lathe and Jess can take a little break until I have something for her to work on, but we'll talk through some bowl turning techniques over on the lathe. I am ready and excited to do a bunch of bowl turning. One of the things I want to do on this lathe is the Laguna has in addition to a variable speed, which I'll control with the speed dial, it's also got ranges of speed. So for this size bowl, I'm going to step this down to the lowest range, to the number one range. We're set there. And 14 inch diameter bowl, so I'm going to do that out here on the outboard side. That gives me a bigger swing. The other thing I've got going here is I've got an extension on the outboard side that's going to give me plenty of wiggle room to manipulate the tool arrests, in fact, there's enough room here that if we wanted to, we could have the chuck, the bowl, and the tail stock to help provide a little additional support for this particular turning we don't need that. Gonna plug my lathe in. The way I like to get started on a bowl like this is by drilling a hole, do that with a forstner bit on the drill press, that's going to go onto the chuck. Get that nice and tight. And then let's talk through sequence of events. Here's what's about to happen. Turning always consists of three steps, roughing, shaping, and then sanding or finishing. In this case, Jess wants the bowl raw, so we're not going to put any finish on it, that's to help the resin stick. So roughing, I'm going to start on the outside of the bowl and I'm going to get that to a point where it's round and spinning concentrically. Next thing I'll do is start shaping. And the thing to remember here is that the outboard face right now is what will be the bottom of the bowl. So what I'll do is introduce a shape like this to get the outside of the bowl rounded. Then the other thing I'll do on the outside is put a tenant on it. And once we flip this around the jaws, the chuck that we're currently using, we'll be able to externally grab this, so we can turn this around. Once I've got that work done, we'll spin the bowl, we'll turn the bowl, so I can hollow the inside, get this shape going. The big platter that Jess wants, and then also create the quarter inch deep recess in the bottom that Jess is going to put her resin into. As part of that process as well, I'll power sand this with a drill and a disc sander on the drill to get everything nice and smooth. It's coming along great. Now let's see a couple of things. On the outside of the bowl to really optimize your surface finish, when you're getting the shape finalized. You want to go from the center of the bowl out toward the rim and that takes advantage of the way the grain fibers lay so that you're laying them down with the cut instead of standing them up. Inside of the bowl, it's just the opposite. As we get close to being done here we want to go from the rim to the center in order to optimize surface finish. Now, one of the things we want to do is pay attention to wall thickness and bowl calipers are perfect for that. When I do this and I pinch on this end whatever this is squeezing, it shows me on the opposite end. What Jess wants for her resin is a recess here in the middle, six inches in diameter, quarter inch deep. So I want to leave about a half inch of wood at the bottom before I cut the recess so that I'm leaving a quarter inch behind. Right now, I'm pretty close to an inch of thickness down there. So I got some wood to come out of the bottom, up here toward the rim, I could take a little bit more out, but not too much more. I'm going to keep going with that next step. We'll look, we'll be to a point where we can look at cutting the recess in the bottom. So I'm going to do some more turning. Then I'll do some sanding, then we'll have recess. All right, I'm going to sand. As I'm sanding, one of the things I like to do is we're currently running this way. I'm going to put that in reverse and then run the other way. And I find it gives me a better final result. We have fibers in wood, it's like cat hairs. So if I sand all in one direction the fibers kind of tend to lay down in that direction. When I can reverse, then I get better sanding, cause it brings the fibers back and lets me sand on smoother. The other thing that was happening as I went along here is once I got the bowl round and started shaping, I stepped back up to that middle range of speeds. So I could run a better RPM for this bowl. So a little more sanding in reverse this time. And I'm really coming along nicely. I hope Jess likes this one. Jess. How was your coffee break? Donuts. Donuts. Can you look at this and make sure we're on the same pagina, page here? Oh it looks amazing. So the rest of the bowl, I sand at 320. Okay. What do you need? Like, is there a resin sticking issue here? Or what do I need to, do I need to sand the bottom of the recess? No you don't, Well, yes you do, but only to about 120, we can leave it a little bit rawer than we have over here, because a resin is going to get into those fibers and grip. And not finishing is a big deal. Yeah. Not finishing because we don't want to put resin over oil or most finishes that people use. We just want it to get into the wood and then we can finish on top of it . And then I think the other thing you admonished me about was keeping the bottom as flat as possible. Yeah. Particularly in this application we want to keep it flat so we can move that water wave nice up it. Instead of it being more of the entire bowl. See as if there's like a belly button, if there's a innie in the bottom, it's going to mess up the way the resin lays. Yeah. But you can easily fix that by putting a layer of clear at the bottom to kind of self level it. But you'd rather not. Definitely would rather not. Okay. Better to just keep it flat. So that's, so our goals on the recess, depth we talked about flat as possible. Sand to 120. Yep and finish. Well, not finish, like don't finish. Don't finish. Okay. I'll have this ready for you in another five minutes. Thank you. All right. Now that tenon can come off easily. Just hit that with a random orbit sander. You can say on that right off, I'm going to do that. And then we'll meet Jess for some resin work. How did I do? You did great. It looks wonderful. You have it sanded properly and the right depth for any resin. Okay. My work here is done. It's all you now. And one of the things you were just messing with, before we went on camera, is leveling this as an important step. Yeah. Especially when we're dealing with a recessed area like this, because anything off level is going to spill out. It's gonna make it pool up on one side. It'll make it pool up. And it might already do that, and we can fix that, but we want to try to eliminate it as much as possible. So you ready? You go, girl. Go girl. Tell me what kind of, while you're working, what's the nature of resin that you're using for this? So this resin is specifically designed for color work which is what we're doing today. This is a one-to-one ratio. So it's one part epoxy, one part hardener, whereas some of them are more a two to one, even all the way up to a five to one. But these ones are specifically designed to be used with color and have good clarity and good movement. So that's, when people are shopping resin, for if they want to do what you're doing now, that's what they want to look for, is a resin that is designed to mix. Yes. They want to look for one that is crystal clear and designed to take color. And you can really see it right there, the clarity of it is very, very good. Yeah. And as we flashover, with a little bit of heat. So this is to take the bubbles out. Yep, this is starting to work the bubbles out. You can see it dissipating and we're just being real gentle with her right now. It's a heat gun not a hair dryer. Yes, heat gun not a hair dryer. Well, that's sure pops the bubbles in a heartbeat. And you always want to start a little slow and then give yourself some room to add more. So our, what Jess is after here is we don't want to blow the rim. We don't want that, in the perfect world we don't want the resin to come up over the top of the recess. If it does, don't suck it out with a soda straw. You can let it cure out and then sand the whole inside of the bowl to level it back out again. And that's actually what happened here. And we'll talk about that when we get further along. Yeah, absolutely, you can, the nice thing with resin work is you can use it as a finish. So if this does happen to, even during this process, bleed over, we can easily let it cure, sand it, and then put a complete finish layer. And as you're choosing which stripe you're adding, I mean this is just, this is an art, not a science. This, you're just doing what looks good to you, there's no real method to the madness, right? No, not with this part. This part is just all eyeball. Depends on how much you want to have, how much, you know, if you wanted this all dark blue, you could make it all dark blue. But you're, in broad strokes, you're aiming for something that's going to look about like this. Yes, sir. For something that has a little bit of color variant between it, without - You stuck your finger in it. I did On purpose? On purpose, we were trying to create these really pretty swirls through here. Yeah. So you had, you could see there's a real hard edge between the colors until you do that, which is neat. And then it softens them. And if you're using the light blue is a Mica powder. So it has a little bit of a shimmer to it. Whereas the dark blue is more of an opaque pigment. So it'll hold the color a little bit better. And we're just gonna keep working those bubbles up. And one of the things, before we got to the step, we cleaned the bowl really, really well. You can't have any sawdust on there. And then the other thing Jess had me do is wipe the recess with isopropyl alcohol, which is going to come back into the picture here in just a little bit, but just a good wipe across the bottom to make sure there's no dust in the bottom that's going to prevent the resin from grabbing. What you doing? Now we're mixing the waves. Okay. So this is white, tell me again, titanium oxide? This is white titanium oxide, which is integral for making sure that we make those cells and get that lacing that we're looking for with the waves. And this is probably now going to spill over a little bit again, but that's okay. We're not going to cry over spilled resin. No, no, we're not. So we're going to actually flip to this one first. Cause I got that layer up there, pinch the cup. So I think you're aiming for like the seam or no you want to lay on the clear, right? Is that what you're trying to do? Yeah I want to go on the clear here. And it's always a little tricky with these lips because you don't have that little bit of overflow that you might normally get. Like on a tabletop where you kind of don't care because you're blowing over the edges anyway. And I guess I feel like, not that we've, you know we've done a handful of these, not a boatload of them, but I'd rather the resin maybe is a little below the surface then going above it, if you can pull that off. I mean, it just, it just be easier later, but. So this was cool, so manipulating the heat gun. Yep, are you ready for the magic? Don't blink or you'll miss it. This is the really gee whiz part. So what'd you just do? So I just added a squirt of isopropyl, 91% isopropyl alcohol to it. And what happens is it breaks the titanium white and creates those cells or lacing as they're referred to. That's very cool. Yeah. It ends up being very cool. And you could add another stripe down here and probably what I'm going to do, just to define that line a little bit more is just run another nice white bead and then that's. All right, well do your, do your thing. So when you spritz with alcohol, its effect is primarily or only on the titanium oxide, white Yes, it only appears to affect the white no matter what brand I've used. It is definitely singular to the white And percentage is important. This is 91%. 99% would be even more better. Don't use 70%. You won't get the reaction Jess has got. No, you won't. You'll end up with more of a muddied mess. Boy, you got like a you got a deep blue, deep blue meaning the ocean. You can really see it from here it's like being in a scuba mask and looking up your 30 feet of sea. That's really neat. One more flash and we are done. Oh man, really? You ready? Oh I like it like this, okay. You be you. You be you, okay, how about we like do a gentle one then? Or like, a baby one, how about that? Cool. So there you go. You have now created an ocean inside your bowl. And ocean in the bowl. All right. This was really neat. So a couple of things turn a bowl or make a platter or whatever, and then leave that recess in the bottom. Any other last resin tips for people as they play with this? If you're making a bowl, I definitely don't want people to panic if it spills, it spills over. Cause you can absolutely sand the entire thing and then use a brush to lay some resin back down on it and it will look absolutely as good as new. So that's the finish on this is actually a layer of resin, is this top coat right here. Absolutely. Cause that's what this, this one bubble, not bubble, but was a little bit proud, so then got sanded down and then everything is just a clear coat of resin. Yeah. And you can see, it still has a nice crisp line where the color is. Yeah. This one looks great. I like that one better. Yeah. All right, Thank you, very nice.