
Arbortech: Power Carve a Round Bowl
George VondriskaDescription
Arbortech’s Spheroplane simplifies the process of creating consistent concave and convex shapes. This is great for bowls AND it allows you to create spheres.
How it works
The cutter on the Spheroplane is captured inside a collar. Adjust the collar to control how far the cutter projects beyond the collar, or how deeply it’s recessed. The collar acts like an outrigger, helping you maintain the shape as you work on a concave or convex surface.
Cutting AND sanding
When you’re done shaping and ready for sanding all you have to do is remove the cutting and head and replace it with a hook and loop sanding head. You’ll be amazed at how fast the sanding goes.
More videos
Be sure to check out our other Arbortech videos.
Dust collection
Dust collection on the Spheroplane is incredibly impressive. Power carving means removing a lot of material. Whether you’re using the cutting or sanding head, very little of that material ends up airborne.
More info
For more information on Arbortech products visit the company’s website.
I am very happy to have had a chance to mess with ArberTech's newest device here. This is their spheroplane, and the name is gonna make a lot more sense in just a second. Here's what's going on with this. So you've seen cutting tools from ArberTech before. I've got a cutter here.
One of the things that's great about this is these are replaceable inserts, so I can replace them and or when one side. Is dull I can loosen it turn it to a fresh part turn it to a fresh part so there's a lot of life in those cutters, but what the sphere plane is really about is making it easier to do convex and concave surfaces and here's the way that works there's a bale on here when I unlock that. I can turn this ring and watch when I turn the ring the relationship between this collar outrigger and the cutter so as I turn the ring. I'm changing the distance. I'm projecting the cutter out.
As I turned the ring in the other direction. The cutters going in. And again I've changed the relationship between the cutter and the outrigger. What's the deal with that? Well, I've got a bowl that I made and just for you, I cut it into a section so that we could look at this so concave convex, what happens here is that when I allow the cutter to project.
Slightly past that collars that outrigger. That's gonna facilitate me being able to do a consistent concave because what's happening here is that it's almost like a depth of cut limiter, the collar in that when this collar is touching that concave surface, it's helping to control how much contact the cutter has with what I'm cutting. So it makes it a lot easier to get a nice uniform shape on that concave. Now, similarly, let's take that same thing and apply it, open up the bale. Turn this so that I'm pulling the cutter up above the collar like that.
Then on the outside of the bowl. We get the same positive effect which is that outrigger rides. And it's gonna make it much easier to get that convex on the outside. So let's throw this on. Now the other thing that's definitely noteworthy is that.
The cutter can come off. And a hook and loop sanding head can go on there so once you're done with the cutting component of your job, then you can start the sanding component of your job and clean everything up and of course with this we have dust collection. And that's part of the reason for this bale here is that's gonna allow you to control this position so that you can keep that dust hose where you want it and then the bale also gets used in order to facilitate taking this back off of the angle grinder itself so I've already got a bowl that's complete. Let's have a look at that process. One of the things I want you to watch for is how effective the dust collection is on this tool and uh let's have a look at that birch bowl I made.
I have got a lovely piece of birch set up here to do some carving on with the sphero plane and what I really like about this piece of birch is, uh, this is a tree that went down in my yard. I milled this, I dried it. It's gonna be very fun to turn it into a bowl. I've got the spheroplane set so that it is for concave, meaning the cutter is projecting slightly past. On my work I've got circles and the big circle out here that defines what will be the rim of the bowl when I'm done.
Don't want to go beyond that. These inner circles, they just help as you're working to make sure you stay concentric as you start to hollow this out. Ready to go? Now that that first dish is set, I'm gonna increase my depth cut just a little bit. A thing to really watch is dust collection and the fact that um there is no airborne stuff here.
This is doing a great job. Of grabbing the dust and taking it into the vacuum instead of leaving it in the air for me. Yeah It's really looking good. I am gonna just keep doing what I'm doing. There's a lot of rinse and repeat going on here and just keep hollowing, hollowing, hollowing, working my way out to that larger circle that defines the rim and uh take away everything that doesn't look like a bowl I guess.
So one thing I've learned here, like any tool, let the tool do the work and what I mean by that is the way the sphero plane is set up is to help you control your depth of cut inside radius, outside radius. So when it's correctly set just like I was doing here, you can glide across without getting a lot of good gra you know without getting a lot of digging. So as I work on finished passes, I wanna make sure that that setting is right, the projection of the cutter beyond to make sure that I'm not getting a bunch of digging and I'm cleaning it up over here, I still need to just work my way back a little bit, wanna come back to that pencil line. Yeah Yeah And the other thing to pay attention to is you wanna make a bowl, not a funnel, so a really easy way to monitor progress is. If I do this and I measure to the table, if that's 2.5 inches out there.
And 1.5 inches in there there's currently 1 inch below the center of the bowl. That's plenty of wall thickness. So I'm actually gonna go, I wanna get this center part down a little bit more and of course leave the rim alone. So I'm gonna increase depth of cut and I'm gonna keep hollowing here in order to get more depth. And then, uh, eventually we'll flip her over and start working on the outside.
Got that depth where I want to be right now there's about a half inch of thickness between the bottom of the concave and the bottom of the blank. So next I'm gonna switch to the sander and we'll start cleaning up these tool marks. Got the sanding head on and next step is just take away the machine marks left by the cutter and get this looking pretty. And again, I'm super impressed by a couple of things. One, how quickly that starts looking better, how fast the sanding goes, and then two, the effectiveness of the dust collection is amazing.
I'm taking off quite a bit of material here as I clean this up, 120 grit paper, and there's nothing airborne. So, um, little ways to go and, uh, this is looking better already. Inside of the bowl is all sanded, got it flipped over, and once again I'm going to use rings to help keep all my cuts concentric. On the bottom this ring is going to become the base of the bowl, so it's like the rim but opposite. I'm cutting up to it this way and allowing that to define the base on the sphero plane.
Now we're set for convex instead of concave and start taking this outside corner off and then just keep working our way down from there. And um. Yeah It's really shaping nicely and same as I said before, take advantage of what the sphero plane offers to glide over this and lay out, you know, smooth out all the highs and the lows. I'm gonna do a little bit more shaping, then back to the sanding head, clean the back up and uh I'm loving how this perch is looking. Clean it up with the sand on the sphere plane.
And I'm just finishing with a little bit of hand sanding, but here's what we've got. I love it. I can't wait to get this sanded out, get some finish on that. That birch is gonna be beautiful. I love how this came out.
I love doing this freehand power carving with the arbitech tools. I really like the way the spheroplane makes it so simple to get uniform concave and uniform convex. Now in the world of convex, the other thing you could do with this is stick with only convex, and you could make wooden spheres, wooden balls. That's where the name comes from. So I love the way this simplifies my job of getting a consistent curve going inside and outside the ball.
This was really fun to do.
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