An Alder bowl

This evening I popped over to the barn to finish off a small alder bowl that I started at the weekend. Here’s how I left it at that point…

I’d wanted to do a curled over lip but kept breaking the edge so decided to cut this off. I was also going to mount this on my screw chuck hence the small size of the base, however when I glued a block to it and drilled it out on the lathe I found that it was off-centre when I chucked it.

After a bit of investigation it would seem that it’s a combination of the chuck & screw chuck so I may have to make another screw chuck and see how I get on with that. Instead I made a dovetail in the base and chucked it that way.

At present I don’t have large jaws for the chuck so this is how I finish off the base of my bowls – necessity is the mother of invention. I’ve had one spin off into orbit like this (and needless to say it was ruined) but it seems to work well for small bowls such as this.

The alder was nice to turn and looks nice finished off.