The Wooden Goldfish

I had one friend tell me that I am obsessed with captive rings, and to that I’m not going to argue. Captive rings are fun! I found this gorgeous piece of mesquite on the turning blank shelf at work. It was a 3 x 3 x 12 blank and fairly cheap, so I nabbed it. It had a visible knot in it which is what is pictured below. Even though this was fun piece to turn, it also provided plenty of challenges. Like, when the piece is close to being the full length of your lathe and need the rest of the room for forstner bits to hollow out the inside. Admittedly, I do have a small lathe, but it’s an amazing little tool, and I love it to bits. For those curious it is a Laguna Revo 12|16. I also learned it’s easiest to start hollowing on a smaller forstner bit, maybe an inch, and then move up through sizes to the final diameter. All of the goblet’s I’ve done so far haven’t been finished, either. But from the way this piece looked after being sanded to 600 grit, i knew that I had no choice but to finish it. I’ve made a few black mesquite bowls and knew they finished brilliantly. I used my Doctor’s Wood shop pens plus finish or “Shel-wax” as i call it. The finish is a friction finish which means that it builds and shines up with heat caused by friction. So after nearly burning by hands from the heat build-up, I had this brilliant looking goblet. 

Walnut is a very pretty wood, as many woodworkers, and even some non-woodworkers know. Surprisingly though, for all the bowls I have turned, never once have I done a Walnut one. That all changed yesterday when I took a scrap piece of 8/4 Walnut I had gotten from a fellow woodworker and chucked it up. At first as I was taking off the corners of the blank I had loads of trouble with tear-out, even though I had literally just sharpened my bowl gouge. But as i got closer and closer to my final shape, i started taking less aggressive, finishing cuts and got a cleaner surface. Keep in mind though, this bowl is maybe 3 inches in diameter and had at most a 1/4th inch wall thickness, so I was working very gingerly so as not to bust through the side or bottom! (Yes, I’ve busted through the bottom of bowls before!) There is definitely something to be said for turning smaller pieces though, as I love doing “baby bowls” which are no bigger than the 4 inch blank I get them from. Yeah, they might not be practical, or be very useful, but they sure are cute! 

A week or so back, I found this branch...or log...or...piece of wood under my workbench i had been saving for a while. The visible end grain was oxidized and checking and looked a lot like Oak. Okay, well - maybe i was told it was oak, so I believed it was Oak! I put it in between the centers of my Lathe and set it to maybe 700 RPM and started to take it down to round with my 3/4th inch roughing gouge. Almost immediately it started to smell very sweet...like root beer, and once I had taken it down past the bark, I realized this wasn’t Oak! Besides Oak is a very hard wood, and is semi difficult to turn, and just from how easy the shavings of this wood came off, I knew it wasn’t Oak for sure. I had gotten the piece of wood for free at my Wood turning Association’s (An AAW chapter) wood raffle, and kept it under my workbench for maybe half a year before looking at it with wonder. I had just gotten a new tool, a Robert Sorby Captive Ring tool, and had been practicing on some Soft wood, likely pine, to make these sweet captive rings. Oh, for those of you who don’t know, a captive ring is literally a free moving ring around the stem of a piece, that can go up and down, but can not escape because of the size of the top and bottom of the vessel. So I went about turning it until I got to where I would part of the captive rings and switched over to my new tool, and started taking light passes when I got a gnarly catch, and the piece started wobbling. Well, “that’s not good” I thought. Upon closer inspection i realized that I had cracked the interface between the top of the goblet and the stem, because of how thin I went on the stem and how much pressure I was applying from my tail stock - lesson learned there. After lessening the pressure, and re-centering the piece, i managed to part off the rings, and sanded down the piece to what you see in the pictures! I did not apply a finish because of the rings, as I’m still trying to find a good way to get the goblet and the rings finished evenly. After sweeping up my mess, and cleaning up the shavings and being intoxicated with the sweet smell of root beer I then realized that the wood was probably Sassafras, solely because of it smelling like the sassafras root I used to (attempt) to make home made root beer from! The whole shop and especially my trashcan smelled like root beer until I changed the liner, and I’m not gonna lie, I do miss my wood shop smelling like sweet root beer.

Well, I swore I’d never come back to Tumblr from my emo days...and let’s be honest here, I’m still as emo as ever but now i work with wood! But I digress - this blog will be about me, Goldfish, and the things I make from wood. I aim for this blog to be a relaxing place for people to come and look at my work, while feeling comfortable to ask questions and learn about the marvelous world of woodworking. With everything going on in the world (especially Corona virus at it’s height in the U.S at the time of me writing this) I feel many people need an outlet, me included, and think a blog would be a wonderful place to showcase my work, take questions, and receive feedback. This all being said, I am still a novice in my craft. being at it for only two years, and being 19 at the time of writing this, I still have a lot to learn! Anyways, I’ll stop rambling, and hope you’ll scroll, and see some of my work, and please, feel free to like and republish my work, and even leave feedback! I would love to hear what you all have to say!

Many thanks