This is a piece of Alaskan birch heartwood. Turned green to rough, allowed to dry for 18 months and then turned to finish. Then carved and shaped using both power and hand carving tools. Buffed using hard felt wheels to close the grain and and give it a more organic, weathered appearance. Finished in simple walnut oil It’s about 14” across at the shoulder.

Turned Birdhouse for the Lumberjocks Birds of a Feather contest.

As a turner, I love making birdhouses on the lathe, so when I saw the Birds of a Feather contest I knew I had to enter.

The body is made from Alaskan birch heartwood, turned end grain and hollowed on the lathe. Then I relief carved it to bring out the interesting highlights of the heartwood. The roof is spalted Alaskan birch sapwood, turned and decorated with a knurled texturing tool. The perch and hanging finial are walnut. The roof, perch, and finial are finished in bird safe walnut oil and bee’s wax to make them weather resistant, the body is finished in walnut oil only. It’s about 8” tall.

I make these primarily as hanging decorations. Birch won’t stand up to the elements for more than one season, unless you use something more robust than walnut oil and wax for a finish. Typically, if I’m making a birdhouse intended for outdoor use, I make it out of a naturally weather resistant wood such as red cedar and forgo the finish completely. Also one thing to note, birdhouses intended for actual use shouldn’t have a perch, the resident doesn’t need it and it serves only as a convenient place to stand for predators after the eggs and chicks.

As a carver and bowl turner, I never thought I’d enjoy turning pens.

Until I turned one.

For me pen turning is addictive, and a lot of fun. I like the technical precision of it. I still turn primarily large bowls and vases, but on those days when I don’t have time for a large project, I can still get some turning in by making pens. I’ve been known to get up at 5AM and get in a couple of pens before leaving for work, it’s a great way to start my day. Pen turning also lets me use those small pieces of exotic woods that might otherwise go to waste.

In the first picture, the pens are Euro Style twist pens, from right to left: Yellowheart and Corian, Cocobolo and Corian, Sunken Heart of Pine and Corian, Redheart and Corian, Morado (pau ferro) and a matrix made from Gorilla glue with redheart, walnut, and Morado chips.

The Sunken Heart of Pine was a real find. This piece come from a log that was salvaged from the bottom of Lake Superior. It’s amazing stuff.

I often use Corian (a resin-based synthetic counter top material) in my pens. It turns beautifully and wears very well. I get scraps of it for free from a local counter installation company, I give them a couple of pens to show off to customers and they give me more Corian scraps than I can carry.

The Gorillia glue matrix was inspired by Rance’s ring project: http://lumberjocks.com/projects/50020. I built a mold from hardboard around the morado end pieces, which had already been drilled out and had the brass tubes glued in place. Then I packed the gorilla glue and wood chip filler in around the brass tube. I closed the form with another piece of hardboard and clamped the whole thing together. The next day I cut the hardboard form off on the bandsaw and it was ready to turn. The gorilla glue matrix turns just like regular wood and polishes up great. Next time I’ll add copper and crushed turquoise instead of wood chips. Or gold and coffee grounds. Or silver and walnut shells. Or… well, you know, the possibilities here are endless. Thanks to Rance for giving me the idea.

All the pens are finished with several coats of BLO/CA, wet sanded with micromesh to 14,000grit, polished, and finished with Mylan’s friction wax.

The wife of an acquaintance of mine found a beautiful small wrought-iron two-level table frame.

Lovely, simple, and elegant.

Ideal for a sun room or a porch, a perfect perch for a Christmas cactus or a vase or some kind of porcelain Foofery.

You know, like that.

Problem was, it came with a couple of Jiminy-Fixit inserts made from grade-B plywood by somebody who might have once pounded a nail into a 2×4 as the sum total of his woodworking experience.

The wife was unhappy with this situation and asked her husband to make better ones.

Unfortunately, the sum total of his woodworking experience was that he once pounded a nail into a 2×4, it bent, he smashed his thumb and vowed never to risk damaging a hammer like that again.

All was not lost however, my acquaintance once gifted his lovely wife with one of my turned exotic hardwood pens and as my office is full of my craft, he suggested to his wife that much less pain would ensue for all parties if I was assigned the task. The wife, knowing him (and not knowing me), agreed to this foolish course of action and suggested that he ask me and offer to pay.

He did.

And I said, “Sure, couple of small table tops. No problem. Have it done in a jiffy.”

I took the table frame home.

I was busy that first weekend and didn’t get to it.

I was busy the second weekend too.

And the third.

Eventually I just sort of forgot about it. Which I’m sort of prone to do. At least I think I am anyway, I forget. I often sit in the shop. I talk to my cat and drink a beer and maybe another beer. Time passes. Eventually my wife comes to make sure I haven’t killed myself by lopping off something vital on the tablesaw. I’m not really sure what happens there in my happy place, and I don’t really care.

After about a month or so, my friend politely asked me about it, “Say, wife wants to know…if it’s not too much trouble…”

“No problem, Friend, this weekend for sure.”

“You’re the best!”

“Aw shucks!”

And I went home and put the table frame in the middle of my main work area, between the primary saw and the big lathe, where I would see it and remember.

Somewhere around the sixth week, or maybe it was the seventh, I moved that damned table frame out of my way because I was tired of tripping over it.

Time passed.

I communed with ShopKat and Mr. George Killian (God bless that Irishman).

Somewhere, stars flickered and went out.

Summer fled and winter was upon us and I switched from beer to whiskey as befitting the change in weather.

My acquaintance mentioned in passing that the wife thought a plant would look good on that table. In the spring. You know.

Boy, you don’t have hit me over the head with the obvious. Well, I mean, you can, but it won’t help.

It seems that some more time passed. The exact amount is open to debate, but radio carbon dating appears to be involved.

My acquaintance finally cornered me in my office.

“She’s threatening to kill me, then cut up my body with a chainsaw and feed the pieces into the leaf chipper.”

“Have you tried buying her flowers? That’ll usually get you another week.”

“Have mercy, you flinty bastard! You have to help me!”

“Anything. You want I should drive you to a shelter? We could get some beers on the way, you know it’s almost spring?”

“Please, God, I’m begging you. It’s been six damned months!”

“Really? Six months. That’s it? I’ve procrastinated for far, far longer than that. There was this one time…”

“Oh God, please!”

“Hey, it’s not me she’s threatening to go all Fargo on.”

“I’ll pay you double!”

“Hmmm double you say?”

“Triple, you bastard! And I’ll bring you coffee for a week.”

“Well, now we’re talking. Besides what are friends for, right? And hey, Buddy, for your own sake, be careful around this woman, she sounds like a real psycho.”

Eventually I did get around to finishing the tabletops. They’re made from Alaskan birch with walnut medallions. I understand my friend’s wife was quite happy with them – at least she let him live.

When you only have a small amount of time to turn, turn something small.

These are very small bowls turned from Osage Orange for a friend who makes and finishes dollhouses. Both were turned on my MIDI lathe using a collet chuck and a very sharp Beecham skewchingouge. The platter is finished in walnut oil and the bowl is finished in Mylan’s friction polish.

This is an end-grain turned piece of Alaskan Birch. Carved and then colored with aniline dyes: it’s similar to the process I used for this piece: http://lumberjocks.com/projects/35796. It was green turned to rough, allowed to dry for about a year, and then finish turned.

The foot, rim, and finial are American Walnut.

The vessel body is finished in 20 coats of glossy polyacrylic, the foot and cap are finished in simple walnut oil and buffed.

This is a piece of Alaskan birch burl.

The burl was cut green here in the Alaskan MatSu. It was a very large piece of wood and even after five years of drying in the burl pile, it was still very wet inside when I cut it into several large turning blanks. This piece was turned wet to rough, allowed to dry for another six months or so, and then turned to finish. I had intended it to sit on a small flat foot, but after seeing the grain, I wanted it elevated a bit so that you could see the opalescence and spectacular figure – so I added a small walnut base. The piece is finished in natural walnut oil. It’s about 14” in diameter.

What I did with my Sunday.

Euro Style twist pens. The top row is walnut and maple in various designs – mostly I was trying different things with glue-ups. These are the designs I liked, the rest went in the burn barrel. The kits are inexpensive gun-metal models from Craft Supplies USA. I really like that kit, I can buy a 100 of them at a pop without breaking the bank.

The bottom row are higher end models, exotic hardwoods, gold, and customized center rings. Again the kits are from CS USA, the center rings I order in bulk separately.

All are finished in BLO/CA with a coat of Mylan’s friction wax as a final coat.

I normally post pictures of wood turning, but I also do other things in the shop rather than just play around on the lathes.

I’m a retired US Navy officer and live in close proximity to a couple of larges military bases, as such I get a lot of jobs from the Air Force and Army.

This was a shadow box for a retiring USAF Chief Master Sergent. It’s made from red oak (not my first choice but it’s what the Chief wanted). The joints are locking joins cut on the RAS, and glued. The chevrons are black oak. It’s finished in Danish Oil and a couple of coats of a hard polyacrylic.

The Chief’s decorations and flag will be mounted by a professional Trophy/Engraving shop in Anchorage (I just do the woodwork, the foofoo stuff I leave to somebody else).

This piece is similar in design to a previous piece I posted. Same basic idea. This one has some nice spalt lines and a richer more golden color. It’s about 12” in diameter and finished in five applications of Danish Oil.

Didn’t have time for any major turning this weekend. So instead I turned a few pens. From left to right: Pen Multi-tool in cocobolo (contains a knife, pen, screwdriver and a pair of tweezers); copper and myrtle; brushed aluminum and Afzelia burl; gold and red cedar; and finally chrome and myrtle burl. All the pens are Wall Street II models. All the kits came from Woodcraft. Finish is Mylans.

That Afzelia burl is beautiful, but it’s a major pain to turn. It’s fragile and wants to shatter when it gets thin. The first piece I turned split and chipped into a dozen pieces. So the second time I used a very sharp mini spindle gouge instead of the standard skew and that worked perfectly. You really hate losing any of that stuff, since it’s so damned expensive. The end results are worth it though, I think.

This vase was turned from green Alaskan birch burl. The wood was fantastic, filled with birdseyes, swirl, color, and an astounding shimmering opalescence. The burl dictated the final shape of the piece. I wanted to emphasize the fantastic grain and figure. The base is North American walnut, which I think provides the perfect contrast. It’s finished by burnishing with wet wood chips, and then given a dozen coats of natural Danish Oil, followed by a mixture of hand rubbed orange oil and beeswax to bring up the shine. It’s 10” in diameter at the top of the bell.

I named the piece Jupiter because the swirling grain reminds me of the storm patterns visible in the gas giant’s atmosphere.

Unlike most turners, I tend to cut my green blanks from the heart of the log rather than splitting the wood into two pieces. I like the heartwood, or brown heart, that most turners avoid, and in fact I specifically look for trees with large heartwood rosettes. This bowl is a good example of why.

This blank was cut from the center a large birch trunk. It was turned green to finish, wrapped in brown paper bags and dried for 6 months. Once dry, I relief carved the heartwood rosettes to emphasize the grain and growth lines, and then carved the filigree (the holes).

The bowl is about 12” in diameter and finished in Danish oil.

More spalted Alaskan birch burl. The blank for this piece was cut from the largest birch burl I’ve ever found, it was almost five feet across. It came from a tree that was damaged in the Miller’s Reach/Big Lake fire here in Alaska’s MatSu Valley about fifteen years ago. The tree lived for years after the fire and developed the burl in an area of the trunk that was burned in the fire. I found the tree maybe a year or so after it died, much of it was rotten by then and useless, but pieces of the lower trunk were still solid, including most of that huge burl. I got a number of large bowl banks from the burl and a bunch of smaller ones. The fire, which burned several hundred thousand acres, was so intense that winds in the middle of the fire reached hurricane force – as a result portions of the wood that had faced into the wind were embedded with sand and grit, which made for interesting texture, but dulled the heck out of my turning tools very, very quickly.

Because the wood was soft I mounted the blank on a turning plate with 3” screws and turned it at low speed leaving the base thick. Portions of the wood were almost pulpy, but when they dried they were the most beautiful. After turning I let the bowl dry for about 6 months, and then carved and sculpted it to resemble flowing water. The salmon were cut from hard pieces of birch burl stock (I never throw wood away, even when trimming blanks. Pieces of burl and heartwood are sliced into slabs on the resaw and put away in the stock cabinet for exactly this kind of thing). The fish are cut from stock on the big scrollsaw, and then hand carved and wood-burned. They’re finished separately from the bowl, so that I don’t get drips and runs. The whole thing is finished in about twenty very thin coats of wipe-on poly so that it looks like wet flowing water.

I collected tons of cut Alaskan Birch (a sub species of North American White or Paper Birch) from a new road area near my home in the MatSu Valley. The figure and character of Alaskan Birch depends entirely on where it grows. In the deep swamp where there is little light, the trees grow very little from year to year and the grain is dense like hard maple with tight figure and large amounts of brown heart and burl – this is the wood I usually work in. In the open, in Alaska’s 22 hours of sunlight summers, the wood grows quickly, it’s soft like soft maple or pine, and is usually white in color with straight grain – i.e. boring. Good mostly for firewood. The several tons of birch I got from the road cutting was of the later type – but, hey, free turning stock, not like I’m going to turn it down.

The question then, was how to make it more interesting? Carving and aniline dye was my answer. This bowl was turned green to rough, allowed to dry for a year in the shop until it was around 8%, finished turned and then dyed, carved, sanded, dyed, sanded, and dyed again, building layers of color and character. The idea was to create something that looked as if it had grown that way, like coral. The finish is twenty coats of very thin wipe-on poly gloss. It’s about 14” in diameter.

Turned vase from Alaskan birch.

The piece was end-turned from a large chunk of green birch. I spindle mounted the blank, turned it to rough and put a tenon on what would become the bottom. Reversed it into a four-jaw chuck and hollowed with a combination of an end-grain termite cutter and a Sorby goose-neck hollowing tool. Once it was hollowed and shaped, I decided that I didn’t like it. Seemed like it was missing something, so I parted it in half at the shoulder and glued in a piece of walnut I had in the scrap bin as an accent ring. I liked that much better and it lengthened the vase by two inches which I thought worked better with the overall design.

Next I put it aside in the drying cabinet for a couple months until it was down to 8% moisture. I then turned it to finish and sanded it down to about 600grit. Next I applied several layers of aniline dye in different colors (black, red, and yellow), sanding and carving in between applications. The finish is several coats of wipe-on poly gloss.

It’s about 24” tall.

In the sunlight it is spectacular.

Like the previous project I posted, this closed form bowl is turned from a piece of heavily spalted Alaskan birch burl. The wood was cut green and allowed to dry outside in the damp and cool south central Alaskan environment for about two years. Then I coated it in black leaf mold from my compost heap, wrapped it in plastic and allowed it to spalt for another year. The blank was then dried in the shop for another year or so until it was down to about 12% moisture. The wood was very soft and a bowl gouge would only tear the wood, I used scrapers with a pronounced burr spun at low speed. The bowl was turned to rough, allowed to dry for another month or so, then turned to finish. I saturated it in repeated coats of sanding sealer to harden the wood and then sanded it down to 1200grit and finished it with ten coats of wipe-on satin poly. It’s about 12” in diameter at the shoulder.

I’ve lurked around Lumberjocks for a couple years now, and joined the site officially a month or so back. After looking at all the fantastic projects here, I figured it was time to share.

This is a closed form, turned from a piece of spalted Alaskan birch burl. Initially dried in one my outside drying piles for several years, then wetted and seeded with black leaf mold wrapped in plastic and allowed to spalt for almost a year. Then redried in the shop.

The wood was very soft when cut into blanks. It was initially turned to rough as a spindle mount, and then compression chucked for hollowing and final shaping. The neck is a piece of South American rosewood that I thought made a good contrast to the birch. The school of salmon are my signature design and decorate most of my work (it’s an Alaskan thing, when I’m not turning, I’m usually fishing). The wood was then hardened with with a gel sanding sealer, and finish sanded to 1200grit. It’s finished in simple Tung Oil.