Carving a bowl from spalted birch

This weekend I began to carve  a bowl from a birch log.

Birch log

The birch had been hanging around for over a year in my log pile and was being attacked quite vigorously by fungi.

When I split the log, the effect of the fungal attack on the wood was obvious.

Spalted log

Birch is quite susceptible to fungal invasion. The patterning it causes in the wood is called spalting. It weakens the wood but if the rot hasn’t advanced too far it is still workable with care and the resulting bowl has some wonderful patterning on it.

Removing the bark

Using an axe I removed the bark from the blank. The axe has an asymmetrical bevel allowing it to bite into the wood. This particular axe has been rescued from a second hand tool stall, reground  and rehandled using ash.

Using an adze

Once the bark had been removed I used an adze to begin to shape the bowl. To get the most interesting grain patterns I am carving into the rounded part of the half log. The bowl is resting in a specially chainsaw carved log with three prongs that allow a bowl blank to be held in a variety of positions.

 

Using a gouge

Once I have a rough shape with the adze, which is great for quickly removing waste wood I move onto using a gouge to shape the bowl more carefully. The advantage of carving into the top of the half-log becomes clear here as there is now a flat surface to allow the blank to be secured (cheating a bit here and using a workbench!). In fact with a flat bottom, flat sides and flat ends the blank is quite controllable at this stage and can be chocked up in a variety of ways.

 

Beginning to shape the underside of the bowl

Once I’ve got the bowl pretty well roughed out I begin to remove wood from the base of the bowl, underneath what will become the two handles. The pencil line marks the point where the bowl begins to flatten out, but I’ll use trial and error (and feeling with my fingers!).

 

 

 

 

The emerging profile of the bowl

The pencil mark on the side of the bowl shows the profile I’m trying to achieve here.

 

 

Using an axe to take off the edges

Some more hewing with the axe will get remove the edges of the handles. Because the spalted birch has less strength than normal wood I’m having to be careful that the corners resting on the chopping block aren’t damaged.

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