Turning a Kauri Bowl

I'm about to start cutting into a bowl blank, that's maybe the coolest piece of wood I've ever had in my shop. This is Kauri for more information on this material look at the article on WWGOA.com tells you where you can get it, more about its background, its history. But let me tell you this, this piece of wood is about 50,000 years old, so turning this bowl is gonna give me an idea of its working characteristics. What it's gonna look like, when it's machine sanded got a good coat of finish on it, can't wait to get started. This is gonna be a really cool project.

First step here, I'm gonna get this thing around, so just work on this outside surface. This is gonna be the bottom of the bowl, get that shaped, create a recess for my Chuck, turn the whole thing around and work on the inside. Then once I've got this round, we'll start on that bottom profile, here we go. I'm rounding the outside of the bowl with a bowl gauge, and notice those nice long curls that we're getting, you wanna keep watching for that. If we start getting only dust, that's an indication that your tool is dumb.

It's time to stop working and have a look at cut quality, make sure it's coming out okay. Overall, I'm pretty happy. The next step is to create the recess that once we flip the bowl rank around, will accept the jaws of the four jaw Chuck I'm using, so I mark out the diameter of the jaws. Then using a scraper, I'm gonna create a shoulder right on the pencil line that I just created. You need to go in about a quarter inch deep, to maybe a little bit more.

And then I'm gonna follow that with a bowl gauge just cleaning out the center. So I have a hole here that holds up the jaws. With the recess complete, I can loosen up the jaws of the Chuck flip the blank around and then remould. So now we've got the bowl going in the right direction, now we'll be ready to hollow the inside. After the bowl gauge begins start hollowing the inside working from large diameter to smallest gonna give you the best possible cut quality and again watching out shavings to make sure they're curves and not dust Otherwise it's time to stop.

I really wanna make sure I end up with a bowl and not a funnel bowl calipers let me gauge the wall thickness. Once I've got the bowl to the right depth and the wall thickness is correct. It's time for some sanding power sanding makes sure to work on this. I've got an inflatable sander on my cordless drill. You'll find inflatable Sanders at woodworking specialty store.

For hand sanding, a sanding sponge work great sand paper, not so much. The corners keep scratching the relatively soft kauri. I decided to finish the bowl with a gloss spray lacquer. I wanted to get a real high gloss on here to really pop the grain. To help the lacquer level out here's a nice trick.

leave the aerosol can in a bowl of hot tap water for about 10 minutes before you're gonna spray. Once the lacquer is dry I could flip the bowl around to finish off the bottom. I've got extension jobs with rubber grabbers on my four jaw Chuck and that lets me gently grab the rim of the bowl so I can do this work on the bottom. My goal in this step is to eliminate the recess that accepted the jaws in the four jaw Chuck and create just a smooth concave hollow I'll sand it sign the bottom of the bowl and then apply finished just like I did on the top side. I grabbed up that kauri bowl.

And let's have a look here there it is minus the sawdust. This was quite an experience for me. I really enjoyed working with this wood. I would say it cut very similar to a Honduras mahogany. The grain is really cool, like, and I've got a couple of coats, a high-gloss lacquer on there.

I really wanted to pop the grain with the gloss. So overall I would say great experience for an end-user people have to really understand that this is a premium product. It's a 50,000 year old wood as a result. It is not inexpensive, but boy, was it cool to work with? I really feel like I have a piece of history here in my hands.

This was a blast