Woodturning Mineral Inlaid Cypress Bowl

Welcome back to my shop. To make a long story short, I have been experimenting, if you've seen my videos so far, with some mineral inlays instead of soft stone inlays, which are more common. And I've solved the problem of filing this down using a small diamond coated disc, and that works very well. So now, going on to the next step of this process, I have to decide between these two blanks that I've prepared in advance, and I need to consider what are my options and why I should choose one over the other. So, if you can see here, I have a blank of mulberry. It is about 30 cm, 30.5 cm wide, which translates to 12 inches, pretty much exactly, maybe a little bit more. While here, I have a piece of cypress, which is if I look at the blank size, sorry, we're talking about 26 cm or about 10 inches. The reason to choose one over the other are as follows. This piece, the mulberry piece, is a lot fresher than this piece, so cutting into the fresh mulberry will be much easier than cutting into the more dry or the drier cypress, although cypress is much less denser than the mulberry. My main issue is that working on this bowl that I'm going to make, if you haven't understood from the title or from what I said so far that I'm going to make a bowl, then I am going to make a bowl with a wide rim so I could implement my recently acquired knowledge in embedding those stones in it. My main concern is that I don't have a lot of time to work on this project, and I will have to split it up over a couple of days, maybe 3-4 days, since I have only about an hour, an hour and a half a day to invest in this project. So, at the beginning I was sure that I'm going to make the bowl from mulberry, but since I know cypress warps very little while drying, I think I'm going to go with the cypress. I will be able to shape it and leave it on the lathe, and then come back to it a day later, and it won't be out of center and it won't wobble as much as I know the mulberry does. And it does. I didn't know where else to go I was paid to shoot a man I just shot him and then I ran I didn't even get the money I owed I turned around and took to the road I've been wondering to where I'd throw And made my way to Chicago I set fire to the barrel And bullet fly like an arrow I see the trouble in the poor man's eyes I see his soul take to the skies Gone away Yes I'm gone away Yes I'm gone away Oh gone away Yes I'm gone away Yes I'm gone away guitar solo I've got a hole in my My stomach's turning and I'm broken I keep crying under rain, oh yeah I keep trying to fail again What we have here is our unfinished on the inside bowl, our inventory and then I've got everything set up here to mix some casting epoxy which will be the first time I'm doing it so forgive me if something goes wrong What I also have here is this small silicon container or a mold which I bought in the supermarket and I thought that if I have some resin left then I should simply pour it into the into the mold and then I'll use the mold to pour in any future resin leftovers I have and maybe that will produce an interesting blank that we can do something with but that only time will tell I have here some plastic straws that I thought I might be able to use to mix the resin and I got a couple of plastic chopsticks for the same reason, in case these are too soft a plastic cup I got my reference piece here if you can remember it the recess that I've made for the inlay is actually deeper than most of my stones if not all of them so I'll put a few here inside you see those are quite small fragments of stones and they are all below the height of the rim so my thought at the moment is to fill this up with stones and then pour clear resin on top of them and hopefully a little bit above so I will be able to scrape it and sand it down to flat so I'm just going to spread the stones around and I'll try to shift them around to fill it as best as possible so ok so this epoxy not epoxy I'm sorry this resin that I bought is a two part resin and as you can see it's labeled A and B maybe this way it's labeled A and B and I need to put 60 of 100 of A to 60 of B so every gram of A should have 6 tenths of gram of B now trying to figure out how much epoxy I should put into this is beyond my mathematical skills so I'm just going to guess it and I'm going to guess that I wouldn't need more than 5 grams of material in total looking at this and filling all those small voids so I can always mix more so I'll mix 4 grams I'm sorry let me think again I'll mix 3 grams let's do 4 grams of A and then the 60% of that of B let me get a calculator obviously as you can see I've already mounted back the bowl on the lathe and the resin is all cured up now if you're asking yourself Yuval how come you didn't show us how you cast the resin well due to technical difficulties which boils down to me forgetting to press the record button I didn't record me casting the resin so just to make the process clear I just weighed out the quantities mixed them slowly and then poured the resin over the stones so now the resin is dried I can see there are a few points that the resin has dried lower than the level of the wood so what I'm going to do is I'm going to file these stones down and then the next step I will fill up all the gaps with beads of medium CA glue and I will give it a couple of hours to cure before I give it the final sanding now I hope you can hear me because I am speaking with my respirator on I have no intention of taking off this respirator at least in the vicinity of my lathe while I'm still working on the stones if there is one thing I know is that I don't want to breathe stone particles ok this looks flat and it feels flat with the glove, let me try with my bare hands this feels flat so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to sand this a little bit with 80 grit I don't need my gloves anymore I'm going to sand this down to 80 grit maybe to 120 and then I will give it a coat or a bead of CA glue to fill in all the small gaps as you can see there aren't many gaps not like our experiment but there are little points where the resin has shrunk or dispersed and there are small points of voids nothing serious ok the way I'm going to file this down is I'm going to use this piece of wood and wrap my my sanding paper like this around it and this way when I come to sand I can sand it flush and flat when you leave a sharp edge on your bowl and you're not careful it will widen this gap but it's nothing that a band-aid won't fix I really like the way this sanded out and as far as voids and holes go there are actually very few of those there's a little bit here and a little bit here some tiny depressions here this is perfectly flat a small point here a small point there so this is really, I'll just go and put a drop of CA on each one of those little holes and those are not many, I can see just about 10 or 15 of those but will be wiser once I get the CA on I don't wanna sit in a gate with you baby tonight I don't wanna have things unknown looking at the stones angled with the reflection of the light shows me better where the depressions are I really don't know how the pros do that with this process you just need to go visit one someday and have a look so I'm gonna leave it here to cure for a couple of hours this is medium CA glue so it will cure slower than the normal steel CA glue and as always at the end of my videos here is the finished ball now there are a few points about this ball that I would like to make before I show you the rest of the angles that we're used to at the end of my videos so the inlay itself didn't came out perfect there are some small fittings in general it could have been done better about the shape of the ball in general which I'll show you later I don't like that either it didn't come out the way I imagined it should about the finish maybe you can't see it in the video but it came out very streaky I don't know if it's because of the wood or the way I applied or the current temperature or what was it exactly that made the finish have a streaky look but I don't like it the overall ball I have to say that I love it it's pretty I like it it's large, it's functional it has a stone inlay my very first I love it it was a very pleasurable project to work on and to learn from I think I'll be doing more of these in the future about the surface of the stones not coming out completely flat like I would have loved it to come out I think that what I'll do next time when I'm trying to inlay something into wood like this in this type of orientation from the top I will make my groove much deeper I'm not talking about a whole lot deeper but I'm definitely going to leave about a millimeter a millimeter and a half of depth over the depth I'm planning to make the stone inlay and in that effect when I will fill that groove completely with the stones and the resin I can simply cut away a layer of the wood and stone and resin leaving a completely flat surface with no marks on it whatsoever and that would be the thing I'll do next time around let me give you a few more angles of this lovely bowl Thank you for joining me in my shop for this week's project and I hope to see you back in my shop creating beautiful things very soon