Cicip Working

Priscillas bowl end grain tear out and what to do about it

Hi Everyone,

Well, it has stopped raining, snowing, and being generally crazy with regards to the weather around here so Im going to go down and take a look at the bowl.

In my last posting I indicated that I had hollowed it out more and here is a photo of that:


There is a problem here, however, and its called tear out. The grain in this piece of wood ran straight across the blank and when I cut across the grain, the ends of the fibers tore instead of cutting cleanly across. Here is a photo of that. If you look at the center of the bowl wall youll see a whitish area. That is torn grain.

There are several ways to deal with that-sanding, which can take a while to sand away, or you can stiffen the fibers with shellac or lacquer and then lightly re-cut the surface with a newly sharped bowl gouge:


And thats what Ive decided to do here. Ive sprayed some lacquer across the surface and its going to dry and harden the fibers. Then Ill re-sharpen my gouge and gently cut the surface until its smooth:


Im going to let this harden and Ill be back a little later today to work on it more.

VW