Carved Bowl

I've been wanting to try and carve a bowl for a long time. For some time Robin Wood has been plugging carved bowls as a natural progression from spoon carving and he also runs courses. A while back I bought myself a Hans Karlsson adze so that I could have a go. That first attempt never really got off the ground as the set up I arranged for holding the bowl whilst I used the adze didn't really work and for some reason I've not tried since. When my lovely wife bought me a Hans Karlsson dog leg gouge for my birthday, I decided to give it another go. I didn't want to be too ambitious so I decided to make a small bowl. Having looked into lots of different methods for securing the blank I opted for the simple option of holding the blank with my left hand and supporting it on the block. I know that there are better ways of doing this, but I didn't want to spend time making something to hold the blank rather than just making the bowl. I was really surprised at how well this worked. The HK adze is amazing. You can be quite precise with it, It cuts really well and I found that the shape of the adze really helped to define the shape of the bowl.

 
Feeling rather pleased with myself for my adze work it dawned on me that I still needed some way of securing the blank whilst I used the gouges. So again I opted for the simplest solution and just screwed it down to a pallet that was lying around in my garden. Not very sophisticated, but it worked.

In fact it worked quite well because I could kneel over the work and use my body weight with the gouges.

So how did the dog leg gouge perform? It didn't. It was too big or to be fair my bowl was too small. It's really designed for bigger bowls and so didn't match the contours. Serves me for chickening out.

Anyway, this is where I finished off this evening. It was starting to get dark and to be honest I was getting tired. With my injured finger I'd not been able to do much so I need to get used to using an axe again.