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Cracked bowls.. lemons or lemonade?

S

Scott Barton

Joined
Jan 2, 2012
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Location
Kansas City
Website
www.phaedrusdesignlab.com
So, a fella gets done turning a green bowl. As it dries, something goes wrong and it cracks. It happens.

So, the question I have is what kind of fun and exciting things can you do to it?

I'm not interested in the "chuck in the fire pile and just walk away with a lesson learned" type of answer. There is always that.

I'm thinking about how now you have this very fine bowl that you have created, but it has a crack in it. If you were to look at that as your canvas the same way you looked at your roughed out blank, what might you do?

George Nakashima used dovetail keys to highlight and exploit giant cracks in the slab furniture he created. Now, he wasn't fixing a mistake, but actually adding structural stability to the slab of wood, but you get the idea.

What kind of creative (and hopefully successful) exploitation have you come up with when confronting cracking type of adversity?
 
Scott,

Like you I don't like just chucking the bowl. I have taken a dremel tool and using an abrasive disk cleaned out the crack and then add lines to draw a tree, grass, flower or etc. Then fill the crack and lines with turquoise, brass shavings with color, or etc. I'll do this inside and out and sometimes even adding some lines on the other side even if no crack is present there. If you want some beautiful turquoise that isn't blue check out Larry Fox's site at foxywoods.com. He has available cripple creek turquoise and he also does amazing work with it and the color really compliments wood. Disclaimer: Larry is a friend that I have learned a lot from him and his processes and have used the cripple creek turquoise quite a bit.


Thanks for started this thread and I hope others chime in because I love the creative methods people come up with to embellish bowls and such with cracks.

Dale
 
I my have some but I am terrible at shooting my work and it goes out the door to fast. Go to Larry's website and he does the same thing and I think he has lots of pics.
 
Scott Barton said:
So, a fella gets done turning a green bowl. As it dries, something goes wrong and it cracks. It happens.

So, the question I have is what kind of fun and exciting things can you do to it?

I'm not interested in the "chuck in the fire pile and just walk away with a lesson learned" type of answer. There is always that.
...

What kind of creative (and hopefully successful) exploitation have you come up with when confronting cracking type of adversity?
Click to expand...

Scott, sometimes if you just wait, the crack will seal itself. I learned this from David Ellsworth. When just waiting works, you will find that the crack is almost invisible.

Of course, sometimes just waiting doesn't work. That is when you really have to be a little creative.

Matt
 
I made some bowls for a Medieval culinary group, one of the developed a bad crack.
At that time, they sometimes repaired bowls with a large metal staple, so I made a large metal staple....
 
One option is to cut shapes out of the bowl that can become parts to a larger turning. I.e. if the bowl was turned relatively thin you could cut out two pieces with the same profile on opposite sides of the bowl and use them for wings for an angel, turning the head and body as a separate pieces as once example.
 
it is like a lot of features, hide it or flaunt it. If it is a small crack, finish turning and then open it up and have it look natural. If it goes all the way to the rim though, it is prone to explode.
 
Rehydrating

I don't turn many bowls, and when I do, I turn from blanks that are pretty stable to begin. That said, I have in the past, saved many overly warped or cracked turnings by plunking them into a bucket or tub of water and allowing them to swell back into shape. Sometimes I have been able to simply re-turn the piece to thin wall and let it dry again. The thin wall is less prone to a lot of movement.

After soaking, cracks have often swollen closed to "hairline" status, allowing a thin CA treatment turn a "too nasty" into an "acceptable". Just remember that the water that is taken up by the wood by soaking will came back out in a much shorter time than the first go around, but something must be done to prevent the excessive movement that caused that cracking or excessive warping in the first place.
Add a rim or collar? I put one into my cole jaws and tightened up on it daily until dry. There was a bit of spring back, but again, it came out acceptably (and better than if it gone to the burn barrel.)

Just another thing to try.
 
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