Tag: Chisel

The contents of my checked luggage

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

Every time I come back to the US for work or vacation, I go back to France with maxed-out checked luggage.  Not smuggling contraband or anything, just comfort food, hand tools, and stuff we cant get there. I have only been stopped at customs once and it was an hour long “what is this” game.  All sorts of fun explaining what an 8TPI lathe chuck was….

If customs decides to stop me this time they will find the following in my 2 huge duffle bags:

1 thermarest mattress pad
4 bags of Vashon Roasters Coffee
2 Starbucks mugs from home
1 giant 5/8″ bowl gouge (lathe chisel)
3 sets of Queen sheets
1 end grain lathe chisel tool
New snowboard boots.
Found pocket knife
2 jars of Coconut oil
Multi Vitamins
1 ziplock bag full of shelled pecans from my aunt.
Bottle of Tums
Christmas presents from my mom for my wife
A new hat (Heisenburg-ish and green)
17mm combo wrench and 17mm socket
2 sets of workshop/garage plans
Specialty hardware from Woodcraft
A second notebook computer
4 months worth of mail
7 books
End grain specific lathe chisel
75mm bowl jaws (for previously mentioned lathe chuck)

Wood Carvings at the Cluny in Paris

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

We spent 3 hours at Musée de Cluny (Musée national du Moyen Âge) in Paris on a recent trip. I highly recommend the little museum and the adjacent garden. While I enjoyed the tapestry and armor and paintings, it was the wood carvings that really stood out. The detail… Braids, carved folds in the dresses, miniature figures and scenes in a triptych that were beyond belief, fingernails, pages of a book… All carved in 400+ year old oak. Astonishing.

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Side note: the plums in The Unicorn Forest (forêt de la Licorne) section on the garden were ripe and falling. I tried one ant it was delicious – upper sweet and deep blood red. They will make terrific jam. I may have brought 10-15 plums home with me and extracted the seeds. I plan to plant a few in a local forest and I have a sneaking suspicion that a very similar tree will grow in our yard in Seattle and in a friend of ours yard in Portland…

Another Cherry Bowl

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

I spent another weekend afternoon playing on the lathe. I made a mate to the cherry bowl I turned last month – the other side of the tree trunk. It was a little smaller block of wood and I roughed it out a little quicker. I decided to keep this one instead of giving it away and use on the dining table for fruit and such. It colored up really nicely – a warm orange that will darken with age, but it has checked a little more than the first one – it hasn’t split and hopefully won’t – but there are a few fine cracks that have popped up here and there.

I started it out thinking it was going to be a different shape, but due to some spongy fruit-wood, it became more of a vertically sided bowl with a deep finger groove on the bottom. Like the last bowl (and most of my bowls and lids), I turned a little detail in the bottom of the bowl because I think that curiosity should be rewarded. The bowl is again finished off with my own mix of beeswax and walnut oil. I am going to let it dry for a few months and reapply.

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From tree to bowl with a LOT of sweat in between

/ Matt Talley / 1 Comment

I have a colleague that was making over a large section of his property out in the French country-side and he needed a dying cherry tree taken down. It was a big old tree with what looked like lots of good hard wood in the trunk base, so I gave him a hand. I thought I could tun the wood into some nice bowels, mallet heads, honey dippers, etc… and he agreed to let me have some of the wood that was destined for his fire place. Holy Crap it was work – not at all helped by his tiny electric chainsaw. It made me long for my 30″ bar, 2-stroke beast back in my Seattle garage shop.

After cutting 2 good rounds and trimming up the root ball, I split the rounds in two, then put 200 pounds of wood in the back of my tiny Suzuki Swift and hauled it home. Into the garage it went and the wife and I were off to the Saturday Market. I came back to one of the rounds on the next night and decided to prep it for turning. With my Japanese hatchet and hand saw, I worked it into an octagon-ish shape. There was a lot of rot in the outer rings and the sections did not make as large of bowls as I had hopped, but the root ball will make an AMAZING centerpiece on the table for holding bread or fruit at parties. I am getting ahead of my self a little…

Anyway, the first section was a beast! It took me 3 hours to go from the half-round to the round bowl-blank. I almost threw the hunk down and took it over to my neighbors wood pile while just roughing it into shape with the axe. The wood was SO FREAKING HARD! It got worse when I started spinning the thing! My roughing gouge was super sharp when I started and I had to sharpen it twice again during the initial turn. There was a break in the turning where I built a jig for my turning chisels so that the sharpening angle was perfect every time, but that is a different tale…

I have never gone from tree to bowl before and I wanted to see if I could do it well. Usually, I either glue up hardwood scraps or buy a rough elm or maple blank from my hardwood dealer in Seattle (With the coin I drop at his place, he is most assuredly a DEALER! His crack just has figured grain and tight growth rings…) Anyway, I might should have picked a tree with softer wood for my first time, but how many turners back in the US can say that they cut down a old cherry tree in France and made cool stuff with it?!

I finished up the bowl four nights after I started turning the rough shape. I had to work around some rot and cracks, but the final shape turned out really nice. When someone handles the bowl and flips it over, they will find my makers mark and I turned a little detail in the bottom of the bowl because I think that curiosity should be rewarded. The bowl is finished off with my own mix of beeswax and walnut oil. After two coats, it colored up beautifully. There are a couple of spots where it may split along the rim, but that is just the nature of the wood and that specific piece – it will add character to the bowl. This one was done for the guy who gave me the wood and I will turn a couple later for our house.

I was really proud of how it all turned out and the final product made all the sweat and cussing worth it.