Carving a Dough Bowl

Todays post is brought to you by the number 2 and the letter L. Ha. Anyone remember what tv show that was from? First person gets a prize. On to todays project: carving a dough bowl. Our temperatures were decent enough to do a little work outdoors so we headed out to carve a dough bowl.

Before we could get started, Jim used a strap to hold down the block of wood in order to keep it from moving around. He’s smart like that. He used the chainsaw to angle the ends of what will be the underneath part of the bowl.

Then he used the hand-held grinder and a Arbortech Woodcarver Blade to shape it even more. It does a good job of taking of extra wood and leaving it quite smooth and gives it a hand-scraped look. Its like a chainsaw saw in disc form.

With both ends cut and shaped it was time to turn it over.

Jim started by using the grinder again, this time switching the blade to a carbide tipped wood carving blade, starting with making the outline of where we wanted to carve. I had asked how hard it was to control, thats how this happened…

Since there was so much wood to be removed, Jim first picked up the chainsaw and started cutting into the blank. Of course he could only cut down as far as the strap for now.

Continuing on with the chainsaw he removed as much as he could before picking up the carving tools again.

Thats when we turned the bowl around to start on the other end.

With both ends carved out we decided to ease or slightly round over the edges so Jim used a different blade on the grinder for that, the Turboplane blade.

Once we were happy with the shape, we took the bowl into the workshop for a little sanding. Jim uses his wood sculpting tools on the grinder. Only a light touch of sanding was required but no wood project would be the same if sanding wasn’t involved.

And…

In a few weeks time we will take the bowl back to the workshop for a final sanding. The wood needs to dry out a bit more in order to get things smoother.

Here are a few more examples of dough or trencher bowls we have made in the past, here and here. Any and every shape is possible. We have a few more ideas for the next bowl we carve.

Later