Small Pear Bowl

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The wood used to turn this bowl is a Pear. I don't know the exact variety but it is a non-bearing fruit tree, in this case planted in a shopping mall parking lot. One day I was driving past it and they'd cut all these trees down. All the branches had been chipped and hauled away and all these 2 foot long logs stack in piles all around this parking lot. I loaded up as many as I could get into my small car. I went back the next day and there was even more and this time the tree cutters were there and I asked if I could have some of this wood. They said I could have as much as I wanted, so I loaded up my car again. It took me three days to cut all that up, prep and seal it, stacked to slow-dry. This is a plain grain but beautiful wood, a nice creamy to amber color. It's hard as heck too when dried. I had this little piece drying for a while and decided to go ahead and try to turn it. I couldn't resist seeing how this wood turned. It turns like a dream! You can get a finish so smooth you barely need to sand it for finishing. This bowl is about 2.75 inches across and about an inch and a half high, with a foot ring around the bottom. Unfortunately, I should have let this dry a little longer because the bowl cracked down the side by the day after I turned this bowl. It's still usable though. I can't wait to get into a bigger bowl blank of this wood. But I'll have to wait a couple of years, I guess, before it's dry enough.

Small Plum Bowl

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This is a small bowl made from Plum wood. A decorative variety of Plum, with purple leaves. I don't know what kind it is, but I got a hunk of one of its branches that broke off in a storm. This bowl is about an inch and a quarter high and about 2 and a half inches across. It has a "foot" ring around the bottom.

A Set of Wooden Trays

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I needed some small trays for use around my restoration studio, so I decided to make them. I made a set of three 8 inch square trays with sides 1.5 inches high. The bottom is 1/4 inch MDF and the sides are poplar with 1/8 inch finger joints, made from bits of scrap lumber from my wood shop. I gave them a quick coat of boiled linseed oil. These will have removable liner pads because sometime you want padding and sometimes you don't.

Small Spalted Maple Canister

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Here is a small canister made with that nice spalted Maple wood I've been writing about. It's just under 3 inches tall and a little over 1.5 inches wide with a friction fit lid. This piece of wood looks like marble. Real stone marble. Nice that I can make stuff out of little pieces of this wood.

Larger Spalted Maple Bowl

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What an amazing looking piece of wood! I think this is my largest bowl so far. (I have what's called a "mini-lathe". The largest bowl I can turn is 10 inches.) This one's a little over 6 inches across and a little over 4 inches deep. I'm limited by the size of the blanks I can cut, which up 'til now weren't very big. I've been super-lucky that I got all this spalted Maple and it literally fell in my yard . . . free! So the "cost" of all the work I put into cutting it up and preparing it are well worth it. I mean, damn, look at that wood!

Another Spalted Maple Bowl

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Yes, yet another spalted Maple bowl. Sorry for the poor quality of the photos.
I have a big Silver Maple tree in my yard. A few years ago we had this tree trimmed away from the house, and that involved some pretty big branches. I saved a 3 foot long section of a nine inch thick log from that job. It sat under that tree until now . . . actually, a little too long. It was on the ground, which allowed the termites to get at it. This wood was actually sitting on a pile waiting to be burned. I thought it was a lost cause. On a whim, I took a saw to it just to see how bad the insect damage was. To my surprise, there was a lot more log untouched by the insects than I thought. The spalting inside was incredible! I had to save some of this wood. I ended up cutting that entire log up into bowl sized blocks with a hand saw! I couldn't get my chainsaw started. I ended up with about a half dozen bowl blanks and some other smaller pieces that might end up as canisters or boxes.
I made this bowl with my three new lathe tools that I made myself. A medium size and a small round carbide tipped gouge and also a medium square one. They work great. And I don't have to sharpen them!
The spalting in this wood is more extensive than the last batch I had (from the same kind of tree but the wood was way older and almost rotten). The wood was in better shape  than the last batch; not as punky (soft and crumbly, kind of spongey). The piece of wood I used to make this bowl had some minor insect damage in it, but it's barely noticeable. To me this looks like a cross between wood and marble. Even close up, it looks like some kind of stone.
Expect to see a few more items made with this cool looking wood.

Scrap Box Challenge: Sculpture

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This is an Art blog so I guess there should be something like art in it from time to time. So, here we go.
In my shop I have an overflowing box of small wood scraps. These are the small bits of cut-off that look interesting enough to save as use in art projects. Since that box is overflowing, I recon it's high time I made something from this stuff. Heck, that's what it's for!
So, that one big piece, which in the photo is that oddly shaped piece that is the neck and torso, got the idea going. A stylized horse? A psychedelic giraffe? You decide. It's made from seven pieces of wood with very few, or no, cuts or modifications to any of the pieces. Some of the wood was already partially painted. I added a few shots of spray paint. Threw on a padded drawer liner for a stencil (for that checkered effect) and gave it a couple more shots of spray paint, and we're done. This thing is about 24 inches high, 12 inches long and about 3 inches wide.