Time-lapse - turning a nearly 10" Ficus bowl

I have a large pile of large logs of Indian Laurel Fig (Ficus microcarpa), AKA Chinese Banyan, AKA Cuban Laurel, AKA Green Island Fig. I recently manually resawed one of these in half (took nearly 2 hours over 2 days!), and cut out a 9-7/8" circle about 2.5" thick from the crotch area of one. I sealed it entirely in Anchorseal to prevent checking (splitting radially from the pith, or center), but it formed a lot of mold inside. This is a problem with Ficus in general I find. Today I finally got around to chucking it into my Jet 12x20 lathe and turning a rough bowl. The wood is green, as am I at turning things. This was the largest thing I've turned, but it wasn't too difficult.

This is a time-lapse shot at 1FPS, for an increase of 30x the original speed. The camera indicated to me that it was a 72 minute effort, so just a bit over an hour. I guess I could turn something like 8-16 of these in a day if I had all the blanks prepared ahead of time. It's a bit rough to note that Ficus is a worthless wood. I'd get very little if I tried to sell this. I wish instead a large black walnut (Juglans nigra) had fallen over. I'd get a small fortune for turnings made from that. Of course, I don't consider myself worthy of good wood yet. I'm still learning. One day...

You can see pics of the blank and finished bowl here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/garyfixler/sets/72157621795495963/

Category:

Howto & Style

Tags:

• fig
• ficus
• ficusmicrocarpa
• jet
• lathe
• turning
• turned
• bowl
• wood
• log
• tree
• free wood
• found wood
• woodwork
• woodworking

[123HURST]

You used a spindle roughing gauge to rough a bowl. Sets a bad example for beginning turners.

[gfixler]

@123HURST - I am a beginning turner. What are you calling a spindle roughing gouge? The first thing is a 3/4" Robert Sorby roughing-out gouge, recommended for turning square stock to round - it works great on the rough, non-round initial piece, and cuts well enough (better than the few other tools I had at the time) that I could just keep going with it. That one tool was $75, which is why I only had about 5 tools by this point.

[TheFishingschool]

555th view what do i win? lol jk good vid