On making a wooden bowl

Woodworking is not traditionally my area of expertise. I know some properties of different types of wood and have done a little work with wood, but I have done very few large projects, especially not from the raw tree. So it's about time I dipped my toes in.

"My" museum village is directly next to a wood-disposal area, where material of publicly cut trees is stored to then be shredded and sold on as biogas-material, mulch or compostable material. If trees are cut down - especially after a heavy wind - then this disposal unit also has the tree trunks. However they are not keen on trunks, as they need to get heavy machinery in to process the large diameters. We, on the other hand, are interested in large diameter wood that is not yet broken down, as it allows us to process it to our needs - which are not standard.

At recommendation of people who know their way around wood we picked up a freshly cut birch trunk with 30cm diameter and just about 2m length three weeks ago. It probably had only been cut about 2 days prior. I was told that this was suitable wood for bowls. So I split it, using wedges (sorry, no images), then we sawed out pices of suitable length. At the advice of people who know wood, I split off another 2cm from the middle, to get the heart wood out (apparently birch is very prone to cracking when drying if the heart-wood is left in). I also chopped off the bark using an axe, just to avoid having to carry too much wood around.



Once at home, I hollowed out the middle, initially using a gauge inteded for spoons (i.e. small diameter curvature) and later using a larger gauge. This process took two evenings and was made much easier through the fact that the wood was still fresh. I did initially leave the wood in water when I was not working on it, but then it started to develop dark marks on the cut sides, which I interpreted as the beginning of mould so I stopped soaking.

Once the bowl was hollowed out I used a small carving-axe to give the outside it's rough shape. This worked astonishingly well and I am really quite happy with my progress using an axe - especially this axe, which is my carving axe "Wölfchen" (little wolf - hence the handle carving) and my favourite.

Once rough-carved I smoothed it out using a knife. The shape is loosely based on other wooden bowls I've seen but not directly on a specific finding. Basically it's a round bowl with a little handle on each side. The rough-carved form of the handle - as you can see in the image - has a continuous slope from the rounding of the bowl to the furthest out part of the handle. Handling the bowl, I found this shape to be inconvenient as it did not give me a secure hold when holding only one handle. So I ended up adding a groove on the bottom of each handle for the last two joints of my index finger to rest in and on the top of the handle I added a divet for my thumb. This shape gives me perfect leverage to hold a full bowl with one hand holding one handle.

The carvings on the top of the handles are loosely based on carvings on the handle of a slavic wooden spoon found in Groß Raden.

In general I am really happy with the bowl, however I did learn one major lesson for next time: When splitting the trunk it did not split perfectly and so there was a crack in a part of the trunk. The chunk I used was off the end of the trunk and sadly the crack ended up in my bowl (on the edge of the left handle in the image). While drying, this crack has widened and currently my bowl is not waterproof. I will wait until my bowl has fully dried an then I will see if I can seal it with birch tar and/or wax. However in future I would pay more attention to the wood that I am using and possibly discard it earlier.

Formalities:

• Tools: Metal wedges and heavy hammer to split, saw to cut into segments, axe, two round gauges with different diameters, normal carving knife
• Materials: birch tree trunk, olive oil (final oiling)
• Time: approximately 20hrs