Some bowls

Its nice to be back at my lathe.
I went up the beach a few days ago and picked up some drift wood of course it was wet so I set about turning some wood I had that was dry, the two smaller ones were very dry, the front one is rewa rewa while the one behind I am not sure about, the large platter on the right is matai, a piece of drift wood I picked up last year and has been drying undercover, its overall width is 310mm X 45mm high and all very exciting to turn.







I did cut into the wet drift I had picked up to see what was inside and decided to turn 2 pieces then give it a chance to dry before I finish it some time in the future from what I can tell the wood is a Totara and will polish up very nicely one day but is still very heavy with water.
The back piece will be a light stand, the lower portion will remain in its rough state, the front piece will be some sort of bowl and will eventually be deeper than it is right now there is a lot to do with them when I get started again.














So I went back to some dry wood and decided on a piece of kauri that someone had given to me, as I made the first cuts I was most surprised at the green tinge to the wood it is also very tight grain so a very slow growing tree I can see about 200 growth rings in this piece of wood so that is 200 years old, the bowl is about 220mm wide and given that these trees can be 2 and 3 meters wide the tree this bowl came from could be over 2000 years old.
I formed the outer shape of the bowl and sanded it then set about taking out the middle saving the inner piece for another bowl.
The wood was a pleasure to work with though there are a few hairline cracks in it but this is what happens with wood.
I still have the pleasure of making something out of the inner piece and may yet get a smaller one from inside that.



The bowl on the left is one I have had for a few years it was shop bought and has held a lot of fruit waiting to be eaten, what ever the coating was it had become dirty and dull looking, the bowl is also kauri and more to the colour that I know as kauri its grain is not as tight as the one on the right.
I put some time into finding a center and created a hollow in the bottom to hold it on my lathe, as I first ran the lathe it became obvious it was not round so using a chisel would have destroyed the bowl my only option was to sand it clean some turps was tried but had little effect, with time and lots of sandpaper I have a bowl better than when it was new and I am so pleased now I have made the effort.




Acacia is a hard wood to work with, this piece was a small piece but large enough to save the middle with my coring tool.
there were some voids in the wood so I dug out the soft wood and filled the hole with epoxy and black pepper corns the fun happened when I came to sand the cured epoxy and could smell the pepper.
I had finished the bowl before I decided to try putting the piece that came out of the bowl under it as a foot, I also wanted the insert a piece of something as a contrast, the contrast is not great the wood is I think tawa but as its first life was a weatherboard on a house I am not sure it would be tawa, all in all it was a pleasing project and a few things have been learnt along with turning experience gained. 

The Bathroom

The ceilings in the house are 9 feet high and down each side of the house is a piece of ceiling on a 35 degree angle that is impossible to insulate due to it being next to the roof, the bathroom ceiling was damaged and needed replacing.
I determined we could drop the ceiling level to 2.4m a drop of about 300mm and would enable us to insulate the whole ceiling out to the outer wall, having a ceiling at 2.4m allowed us to use sheets on the walls of the bathroom floor to ceiling however in most cases it was half sheets of 1.2m each, we used a water proof sheet around the bottom half where cleaning and water would most likely be happening, for the top half we chose a 12mm pine faced ply this was coated with a water based product before we put it in place.
The ceiling was lined with the same product as the bottom half of the walls it is a hard glazed type finish made for lining showers with, we installed a LED light strip rated for bathroom use that gave ample light to all the room it is a very good idea that sits almost flush with the ceiling panels.
We totally stripped the flooring and replaced it with a 20mm ply that has a pinkish look about the face veneer this we put down in 3 equal with panels the result was pleasing with only 2 joints and not in a position of a lot of water this left us with a lot of waste ply so a cupboard to sit the hand basin on seemed logical, we do have doors for it they just wait to be put in place.
The shower tray we had made to suit our plan then we filled the step with wood so we could captivate nuts that the bolts would tighten onto to hold the brackets for the glass, the idea is that the shower water runs down the glass and drips off into the shower tray, there is no mastic joint that grows mold and most often leaks out of the shower area causing problems, the floor of the tray has a 20mm ply backing cut and jointed so the tray keeps its draining ability and will not hold water in puddles as it is set level on the floor joists, I like to apply the same theory to the shower wall lining as the glass, there is a 10mm gap between the stainless steel tray and the back of the wall lining the stainless steel is 40mm higher than the bottom of the wall panels I hope this all results in the water staying in the shower area and not getting into the walls.

I made 2 new doors one for the bathroom and a bedroom door both had a good dose of woodworm in them, we also had an electrician
in the house for almost a week to replace the wiring that dated back to when the house was built.
We installed a heater to warm the room on cold nights and an extractor fan as its condensation in a bathroom that causes the most damage. 
   

 

Far away

At the end of February I went to Dunedin, the mission was to remove a fire place that of course involved removing the whole chimney stack which involved a days work on the roof removing the bricks and fixing the hole that remained when the bricks were gone, we found matching tiles, tiles of matching shape but some were painted however from the ground you can hardly tell, next we took the wall board off so we could get the bricks down from inside the roof, the bricks that were visible inside the lounge took me a whole day to remove I was only throwing them out of the window next to the fire place but its a lot of bricks, it was then a further day to remove that piece of concrete as we got to floor level it became apparent a machine was needed to break up the concrete at and below the floor so we could install some woodwork to support a new floor, much of the flooring has woodworm in it so we put down 2 whole sheets of ply wood across the whole room, we re gib board the wall and while doing this had pipes put in for a heat pump to replace the fire, there was a large piece of ceiling to replace and plaster along with the plastering of the wall, some trim along the top and some sealer paint and I think we were at the end of week 2 or maybe a day or 2 more.
Next job was to be renovate the bathroom but that's another blog posting.