Fire & Ice - a Hybrid Project of Woodturning and Burning

This is a project that I completed in the spring of 2018, fairly early on in my woodturning experience. It started in the mind of a child, and ended up like nothing I could have imagined. I hope you enjoy the journey. I know I did.

If you like what you see in this Instructable, consider taking a look at the full video on YouTube. It's one of my longer videos, clocking in at over 15 minutes long.

The inspiration for this project came from an unexpected source: my 8-year-old nephew, James. In retrospect, it shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise, as he has always been an out-of-the box thinker. Prior to a visit over his spring break, his mother (my sister) had given me a heads up that he was interested in making a guest appearance on The Grain Doctor YouTube channel. The visit was mid-week at a time I was unable to take off work, so my hopes were fairly low on being able to come up with a substantive project. Thinking that woodturning is as instant gratification as it gets in woodworking, I ultimately presented him with the following question: "How would you make a bowl out of a piece of wood?"

Here were his steps:

1. Cut it into a bowlish shape on a saw (check)
2. Burn out the inside and smother it with dirt, like the Native Americans (I'm listening)
3. Wash it (you had me at "burn out the inside")
4. Sand it
5. Wash it again
6. Sand and wash the outside (that's a lot of washing)
7. Sand and wash the top bit

I did some searching on YouTube and Instagram, and did find some videos on burn bowls, but mainly presented as a survival technique. Knowing full well that the scope of the project was likely to expand well beyond my initial intentions, I got started.

Using my chainsaw mounted in an Alaskan mill, I cut the blank from a cherry log that my daughter's nursery school teacher had hooked me up with. This left me with a half of a log, split lengthwise. Using a simple circle-cutting jig, I cut out the bowl blank on the bandsaw. I then turned the outside of the bowl on the lathe, including a rough tenon.

Now that I had the general shape of the outside of the bowl, I set about with the burn. Having never done anything remotely similar, I was making it up as I went along. The challenge was to get a deep burn while still leaving bowl walls relatively intact. I started by just using a thin piece of aluminum that I bent into a shield, building the fire in the middle. This was slow and relatively inefficient, so I ended up making a makeshift furnace using a tin can surrounded with mortar, with air vents cast in the base. This proved to be quite successful, though it still took at least five or six burns to get to my desired depth. Along the way, I did make use of the embers to make s'mores!

Having completed the burn, I wanted to preserve the charred interior, while making a finished and lustrous exterior. My plan was to cast the char in clear epoxy, which I would then turn smooth and buff on the lathe.

I first sealed the inner surface with a few coats of epoxy, then tried to see if I could take advantage of centrifugal force to coat the inside with epoxy. As one might expect, this did not work well in the horizontal configuration of the lathe. Had I tried it in more of a "potters wheel" setup, it may have worked. All in all, I was lucky not to end up with a bigger mess than I did.

After that, I figured I would fill the cavity with epoxy, then turn the excess away. To try and save on volume of epoxy (and consequently save $$), I used a thin plastic fruit container weighted down with rocks to take up some of the space in the bowl cavity.

I had used epoxy for a while. I knew that epoxy gets hot as it cures. I knew that mixing too large of a batch could cause problems. Nevertheless, I persisted. And predictably, the darned thing nearly caught fire. No cameras were running as I booked it outside with the smoking mess, but I wish there has been.

My despair was brief, however, when I noticed that the epoxy had flash cured in such a way that it looked like ice on top of of the burnt inside of the bowl.

To complete the outside, I mounted it back on the lathe with a temporary faceplate and re-turned the tenon. I flipped it around in the chuck, and turned the rest of the outside round. In retrospect, I could have taken more meat off of it, but I was afraid of going too far and breaking through to the inside.

In the process of drying during the burning process, a number of cracks had formed. I filled these with tinted epoxy as I came across them. For a finish, I used a relatively simple combination of shellac and paste wax.

The last step in bowl turning when you use a tenon is removing the tenon without messing up the finish you just worked hard to complete. There are a number of ways to accomplish this, but I chose to make a donut chuck, which holds the bowl securely without marring the finish. I used the design from Peter Brown’s video.

With that done, the bowl was complete

In order to display the bowl, I wanted to make a base as unique as the piece itself. I came up with the idea to use the “bowl blank negative” - that is, the part of the rough wood that was left after I cut out the bowl blank. I usually burn these as firewood, so it is somewhat ironic that I chose to save it to display my partially burned bowl.

For this step, I used almost entirely hand tools, as they were the best suited for this kind of work. I cut the negative in half, then used half of the other half (a quarter) as the back support. I cut a half lap joint and glued the two pieces together. I then cut a profile in the back support in order to best support the bowl. I left the base unfinished so as to set it off from the bowl itself.

The results ended up being very interesting. Love it or hate it, it is unique. I thought it looked like fire and ice, but one memorable commenter thought it looked like a necrotic wound. I can’t say I disagree with them, and I am actually something of an expert on the subject of wounds (day job).

From the beginning, I planned to tell the story using Lego animation, with the Lego mini figs paralleling my creative journey. This involved a significant amount of planning the shots, as many of them were composited using a crude green screen. I also had to think on my feet and change the plan midstream. For example, when the epoxy overheating happened, I animated the fire truck helping extinguish the bowl.

The video linked here is from one of my other projects, but it mirrors the steps I went through on this project. I may do an entire Instructable on this topic in the future if there is interest.

All told, at least half of the time spent on this project was on the animation and video editing.

The bowl was accepted to a student/faculty art show at my University, where it was publically displayed for a year. It was in full sun and continued to dry, and more cracks developed, which I fully expected to happen with time.

About six months after I released the video, I submitted it to a channel of George Takei’s (he played Sulu on the original Star Trek). With my permission, they cut it to a three minute video that they posted on their social media pages. On Facebook alone, that version got over 4.5 million views, with mixed, but largely positive responses. Unfortunately, even with the appropriate credit given and links back to the original video, the click-through rate from Facebook is abysmally low. Boo hoo, poor me. 😂

in the end, it is one of my more ambitious projects, and I am proud of the result.