I Carved Giant Waves into This Burl Bowl

Would you like to see a little sneak peek? Today I'm working with the massive tuya burl and this is the second time I'm working with this wood. I previously made a small little hollow form, oh here you are, out of this burl and it looked incredible so I decided to buy a bigger blank and let's see what we can turn out of this burl. I'm using a face plate to mount this piece on my lathe, this is probably one of the safest method to mount the piece onto a lathe and there are obviously several different ways of doing it but once you have a nice flat surface, screwing a face plate then mounting onto the lathe, securing with the tailstock, it probably will never come off unless you really want to. So definitely for any beginner they're probably the safest method to start turning any round shape. Starting off at slow speed just truing up this piece, as you can see it's slightly slightly off the centre, after a little bit of a turning it will be nice and round and then we can move on to really start shaping this piece into our design and designated shape. Quick measuring of one of my chuck jaws, this will be used for mounting the piece once I'm working on the inside of this bore, so here we are making a little more ties for the bottom of the bore. Using a skew chisel just to remove the excess materials in the middle and flatten the bottom and then also because my jaws are dovetailed so it has a slight angle to have a better grip, I'm using my skew chisel as well to do the same dovetail at the bottom so it will have a really good grip once it is on the chuck. And we are off to start shaping, I will keep this on the face plate as long as I can, I will start working on the bottom and once the bottom is ready with rough shaping I will then turn over to the chuck. Here I'm using two different techniques, one is a pull cut and this one is a push cut, some people prefer either, I do like to use both of them depending on what part of the project I'm working on, again now this is a pull cut so I'm pulling my chisel towards myself or when you do a push cut you're pushing your chisel away from yourself. So because this bore will be carved the bottom side of the the wave I'm designing in my head and just popping the grain to show how incredible this will look and we certainly have a very promising wood to work with. And while this wood looks absolutely incredible I will tell you very soon why I'm probably never going to use this wood again, there is a good reason. And now we are ready to work on the inside of the ball and I'm just truing up the front sides before I can start hollowing the inside and then we can move on to carving our tiny little waves. I'm just eyeballing the bottom side where the ball ends and then I will also mark kind of the thickness I want it to have once the inside is also hollowed out and as you can see it's probably a good centimeter, I kept us for the ball thickness and then I can start gently removing some materials from the inside. Okay and now we are on to the exciting part, this is where I'm marking out how and where the waves will start and finish. I'm using my indexing system which is built into the lathe so as you rotate you can mark each segment equally so I can divide then the piece into different parts and mark where the wave will start and with some secondary linings where the wave will have highest and lowest point. Do not draw another line in the middle which really had no purpose so you could just ignore that. These are just guidelines so I won't be exactly following them but at least it gives me a rough idea how to form the waves into and how to carve as I'm going along the the line to kind of guide me through to give back that wave pattern and again another pointless marking maybe I just did it for the camera or I knew I will voice over it so this is the part where I will have to carve out and here again I'm just marking out the highest points so when I do the front face of the carving I know where the highest points should be. The it removes material very fast you have to be very careful as you can see at the bottom I don't go all the way down to the to the line just to have some some wall thickness for the for the wave but it went fairly fairly quick but something will not be as quick and I'll come to that very soon and this was probably the first real giveaway this piece won't be easy to send little salt bay action oh I should say dust bay action so for some reason the dust really stick together like it was either wet but I checked the moisture content and it was okay so what I can assume this wood has naturally a higher oil content so I'm not not too sure but for some reason the dust just really stick together which I knew at this point it would be a to send and I will show you why exactly but for some reason it was just really sticking in everywhere and not acting like a normal normal wood dust for some of the trickier places and smaller places I'm using my smaller angle grinder this one has a two inch or a 50 mil disc compared to the other one has a four inch disc so it removes a lot more material but also harder to get into smaller places and if you like what I do and you haven't already subscribed please smash the big red button and we are off to the finishing stages let's do some sending and this turned out a heck of a job so as mentioned before the dust particles for some reason they were really sticking together so after a couple of seconds of sanding my sandpaper was just clogged up so I'm using this sandpaper cleaner rubber block I think that is a very official name for it and it did help and it did help but after just a couple of seconds of sanding it was clogged up again and I had to finish this piece with hand sanding and I won't bother you to death because it took me literally around three to four hours hand sanding to kind of reach to this look it's sanded up to 240 grit and probably with another three four hours I could have done a lot more better job but I was just curious to see with some oil how this piece will look and I'm really glad to see after a couple of coats of mineral oil the sanding marks barely visible if I have some free time in the future I will go back to and do some more sanding but for now I think we call it a day thanks for watching and see you back next week oh love this green