September 2024 Meeting

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The September and first meeting of the CraobhEo 2024/25 year took place on Thursday the 14th September in the CraobhEo Centre in Aghamore.

Our demonstrator for the evening was Denis O’Donnell ably assisted by Wille Creighton.

This was the first time Denis had demonstrated but he had Willie at his elbow (not that he needed help as he was excellent).

The project for the evening was to turn a wet bowl and explain the process of drying through to finishing at a later date.

Willie explained how to harvest wet wood and explained about rings, quarter sawn and flat sawn wood.

Denis started with a wet blank and mounted it on a screw chuck and using a 10 mm bowl gouge started shaping the blank on the outside. A tenon was turned to hold the blank in the chuck (a deeper tenon is needed for wet wood).

Decide on your shape at this point as this will determine the inside design. The foot of the bowl is usually one third the diameter of the rim. Use light cuts for finishing the outside.

Remount the bowl in the chuck to turn the inside. Hollow from the centre out. Leave a wall thickness of approx one tenth the diameter for rough turning.

Apply sealer on the end grain of the bowl and put it into a paper bag with some shavings to dry slowly.

Willie then explained how to remount a dried out bowl that has by now gone out of shape and true up the tenon for final turning. He went through various ways to hold the bowl to do this.

This was a very interesting evening that went through the life cycle of a bowl. Lots of questions from all present. Well done to Willie and Denis for a lovely demo.