A New Bowl Horse
So I took advantage of the half-term holiday to finish a bowl horse that my pal Peter Wood had chainsawed a couple of months before. The design has been inspired by the bowl horse of Pennsylvanian bowl carver David Fisher, featured in this thread from the Bodgers Ask and Answer forum.
Bowlhorse mark one
The body is made from sycamore with a 10 cm slot carved into it and then holes drilled along the side at about 7 cm intervals. The rest has been made from whatever old lumber was lying around the garden, so that the dumb head arm is from a old piece of farmer’s fence, the dumb head itself is oak from the firewood pile, the footplate recycled from the sycamore slot, the backrest an old piece of cherry and the legs include some really old elm that has been kicking around the back garden for at least five years without rotting- amazing wood!
A real mongrel of a bowl horse then, but I’m really keen to start to use it. As you can see from the blogs below my old Black and Decker workbench tends to get used to help me out with carving bowls, so I’m keen to use something that has a more traditional feel to it and as David describes, allows for the bowl blank to be moved about much more easily in the horse to move from side to side. It is heavy but I’m hoping to take it out on demonstrations.
Lauren on the bowlhorse
Here’s Lauren demonstrating the bowl horse in use. She’s using a Karl Hanson gouge with a polyproylene end to rough shape a spalted bowl blank. I wish the sun shone like that every day in Northumberland!
Just found your website – lovely spoons! Feeling inspired now!
I also wanted to comment on the bowl horse – what an invention! I will have try and build a version! It looks much better than a work bench – which I currently use and leaves me very frustrated – bad back and I seem to spend half the time fetching my half carved bowls from the end of the garden as the fly off when I hit them with a gouge! I’ll look forward to your future posts!