I’ve carved many bowls over the years, and even turned a few on the lathe. In 2022 I carved a couple of bowls for my niece’s wedding, and I’ve carved perhaps two dozen more since then. I’ve developed a pretty standard process by now, although I’m continually refining it. In this post I will show how I go from a raw log to a carved bowl.
Understand up front that this will be a long post and only the first in a series of posts. In this first part I show how I split a bowl blank from a log and then shape the outside of a wooden bowl. In the next post I’ll show how I hollow the inside. After that will be smoothing the inside, filling the cracks, and then final sanding and applying a finish. I’ve hollowed the bowl and will be posting about that soon. It might be a while before I do the rest of the work on this piece.
One other thing. I’m showing you the tools and procedures I employ to carve a bowl from a piece of wood. I’m not saying that this is the only way to do it or even that it’s the right way to do it. I’m showing you what works for me. If you have suggestions for improving things, or questions about something in particular, feel free to contact me via email. The address is jim AT mischel.com.
Wood selection
It strikes me as funny that people often ask, “Where do you get your wood?” It’s as though they think there’s a special place to get logs that are suitable for carving. I’ve often joked that I carve FOG wood: I found it on the ground. Seriously, though, the stuff grows on trees! I find carving wood wherever somebody has pruned or cut down a tree. The neighborhood in which I live has a lot of trees. There’s always a good selection of logs lying around, and people are happy to have me take some away. If they need convincing, the offer of a handmade bowl carved out of wood that came from their tree hasn’t failed.
In addition, new neighborhoods are continually being built in the area, meaning huge piles of plowed-down trees. My truck and maybe some help from a friend will get me more wood than I could ever carve.
Trust me, finding wood to carve into bowls is not a problem. Much the opposite, in fact. There’s so much that I can afford to be, even have to be, selective. Depending on what I’m going for I might select for shape, size, type of wood, etc. Even being selective, there’s no possible way I could carve all the really cool pieces of wood that I would like to carve. Availability of carving material just isn’t an issue.
For this demonstration, I selected this piece of oak that I rescued from the burn pile at Sherwood Forest Faire. When I threw it into the back of the truck a year or two ago, it was fresh-cut and had no splits. It sat out by the garage and, as wood does, cracked as it dried. That doesn’t bother me: cracks are just another feature to incorporate into the design.
I don’t know which of the many different oak varieties this is. There are more than 500 different varieties of oak, a dozen or more of which are native to Central Texas. This one is pretty indicative of oak in general: medium hard, straight-grained, and beautiful when finished. It should make a lovely bowl.
Prior to splitting, the log was 25 inches long and varied from 11 to 12 inches in diameter. I split is approximately in half with a wedge and sledge, and threw the larger piece onto the work table. The larger piece turned out to be about 5-1/2 inches thick in the middle.
I set the other piece aside for later. I’ll probably carve another bowl from it at some point.
I’d never kept track of how long it takes me to carve one of these bowls. Fortunately, I took a whole mess of pictures. The picture timestamps give me a good idea of how long each step took. I didn’t document interruptions, though, so it’s impossible to get an exact time.
The reason I’m keeping track of time is that I’m contemplating selling my work. I’ve always given the bowls I make away as gifts. If I’m going to start selling the things I make, I need to keep track of how much time I spend making them so that I can get an idea of how much to charge. That, too, is a whole other discussion.
Flattening the bottom
The first big task is rough-flattening the bottom of the bowl. For this bowl, the bark side will be the bottom. I’ll end up flattening the top, too, but I do the bottom first because the top is already approximately flat after splitting. It sits nice and steady on the bench. As is often the case I had to add a wedge to prevent it from rocking while I work. It’s a whole lot harder the other way: trying to keep a round log from rolling from side to side.
My workbench is pretty simple. The base is a Black and Decker WorkMate that I bought at a neighbor’s garage sale for something like $20. On top of that is a work surface that I knocked together from a couple of 4×4 scraps and a piece of OSB left over from some project or another. Raising the table four inches did wonders for my back! It also provides a large, flat work surface. Before I got the WorkMate, my workbench was one of those brown banquet tables, four feet long and two feet wide. It was nice to have all that surface, but clamping was a bit of a problem when working on smaller bowls. I might go back to the banquet table, though, for some larger pieces.
I’ve heard it said that you can’t have too many, or too many different types, of clamps. I do have a lot of different types of clamps, but there’s nothing special required here. Just two run-of-the-mill screw clamps to keep the work surface on the table, and two more for a block to keep the log from sliding forward as I work on it. I’m not worried about it sliding backwards because it’s heavy enough (about 30 pounds at this point) and I won’t be applying significant force in that direction. Notice the wedge under the front right corner. That’s there to prevent the piece from rocking as I work.
It’s important to remember that here I’m flattening the surface. I’m emphatically not leveling it. That is, I just want it to be a (roughly) flat surface. I’m not trying to make it parallel to any existing flat surface. The other thing to keep in mind is that word “roughly”. I want something that’ll sit on the workbench without rocking as I’m carving the bowl. A little wobble at this point is okay; I’ll worry about getting it perfectly flat after I finish carving.
I do rough flattening in two steps. First, I put a coarse wheel on the angle grinder to remove the bark and make a (very) approximately flat surface. The primary reason I do this is that it’s a whole lot easier to rough things out with the grinder than with the electric plane. Once I get down past the bark, I begin taking off wood with the electric plane. I can adjust the plane to take from 1/64″ to 1/16″ at a time. I usually start at 1/16″ until I get to where I want to be. I might make a pass or two at 1/32″ if I need to smooth some ridges.
I’ll be the first to admit that the electric plane wasn’t really designed for this use. But it works really well for rough flattening. I know I’ll have to make another pass at it, but that’s okay.
How wide should the base be? However wide you think it needs to be. Seriously, it rather depends on the size and shape of the bowl, and how the bowl will be used. For a display bowl, a fairly narrow base is fine: just enough to keep the bowl from falling over from light pressure on the side. For a bowl that will be used, you probably want a wider base. This bowl will probably be a display piece, but I want to carve it to look as though it is, or was, a functional bread bowl. At least on the outside. I made the base 6″ wide. That will narrow a bit when I carve the sides, but I think the final width will be at least 5″.
From the time I took that first picture of the bowl blank on the workbench up to now is, according to the picture time stamps, an hour and five minutes. I got called away briefly while I was working on flatting the bottom, but I don’t recall for how long. I’ll say it took an hour to get to this point.
Safety
Before we go any further, let me talk a bit about safety. As you can see in the picture above, I wear a full face shield and a respirator. I also wear ear plugs, which you obviously can’t see. This wasn’t always the case. The first few times I carved a bowl with the angle grinder, I didn’t wear any of that stuff. I’d just throw on some shop goggles to protect my eyes, and then get to work. That prevents the most immediate hazard, but ignores the long-term effects of inhaling wood dust and repeated insults to the ears. Oddly enough (or perhaps not), I didn’t improve my safety equipment in response to those dangers, but rather because I found that wearing the improved safety equipment made me more comfortable.
I noticed, after carving a bowl, that my head would be buzzing for a day or two afterwards. The best way I can describe it is tinnitus with a vengeance. One day before carving I threw on the ear muffs I used to wear when mowing the lawn (I use earplugs now), and afterwards I was surprised at how not-exhausted I was. Turns out it takes some serious mental effort to focus my attention on carving with the steady roar of the angle grinder. And that’s when I noticed that my tinnitus wasn’t appreciably worse than normal. Ear protection became an essential piece of safety equipment after that.
The addition of the respirator is a similar story. Debra caught me digging black boogers out of my nose a day after I’d carved a bowl. I realized I was being stupid. I could prevent the discomfort of my reaction to the wood dust and avoid embarrassing situations by wearing a respirator. Now after carving a bowl I can still breathe normally. Plus, I don’t risk some random fungus colonizing the warm, dark, moist land of Lung. The wood I work with comes from the wild; it’s not the kiln-dried, sterile, and perfectly-dimensioned turning blanks one picks up at Woodcraft or Rockler. There are a lot of bacteria and fungi in found wood, and many of them are quite happy to set up shop in your lungs. Those kind of infections are potentially deadly, difficult to diagnose, and hard to treat. Wear an N95 respirator if you’re raising dust. Or at least wear a protective mask of some kind. Even a cloth tied around your face is better than nothing. Anything you can do to prevent inhaling what you’re grinding will help.
I adopted the full face shield on the recommendation of a friend who was injured when a bowl he was turning came apart on the lathe. A piece of that bowl hit his safety glasses, destroying the frame and putting a good-sized gash in his forehead. The very next day I was turning a bowl, wearing a full face shield as recommended. The bowl came apart on the lathe and a piece of the bowl smacked my face shield about even with my nose. I don’t know how much damage that piece of wood would have done to my face had I not been wearing the face shield, but I vowed right then never to find out. I wear a full face shield whenever I’m swinging that angle grinder or using other power tools that have a high chance of throwing stuff at my face.
And then there’s the elephant in the room: the missing guard on the angle grinder. That’s a standard piece of safety equipment, and I tried carving a bowl with it in place. The guard gets in the way. It’s a removable guard, which tells me that it’s an optional piece of safety equipment. I understand the dangers of removing it, but I just don’t see them as critical. In particular, I’m grinding wood rather than metal: it’s not throwing off sparks or small metal shards. I do have to be careful, though, not to catch the workpiece with the back of the disc.
One more safety consideration: keep the area around the work table clear. You do not want to be tripping over stuff when you’re holding on to a tool spinning an abrasive disc at 15,000 RPM. That thing will remove skin with alacrity. I wish I could say that I’m not speaking from experience. Fortunately I’ve only taken off a little skin. Others have incurred much more serious injuries. The tool isn’t inherently dangerous, but it can be dangerous if used incorrectly.
Rough shaping the ends
When I was first starting out with wood carving, I developed what I call the Coarsest Tool Principle. Understand, the concept has been around for ages; anybody who spends time working with wood or any other material they want to shape has probably adopted it without even thinking too much about it. Briefly, the Coarsest Tool Principle says, “Always use the coarsest tool available that will do the job without tearing things up.” For example, if you want to remove 2″ of wood, cut it off! It’s foolish to 30 minutes grinding wood into powder when I can spend 30 seconds cutting it most of it off with a chainsaw, followed by five minutes or so spent shaping the result with the angle grinder.
This bowl will have a pretty traditional shape: wide at the top, narrowing to a flat base, and an oval opening. So the ends curve up, and narrow. I save myself a lot of grinding time by cutting the ends at an angle with the chainsaw. I’m not attempting to make the final shape, although I suspect somebody who’s more familiar with chainsaw carving could do a better “approximate” job than I did here. The first picture below shows one end and the pieces I cut from it.
In the picture below you can see how I clamped the wood onto the workbench so that it would stay still while I was cutting.
According to the timestamps, I spent 25 minutes cutting the ends off the bowl. Most of that time was spent locating the chainsaw, sharpening the chain, and adjusting the chain tension. Call it an hour and a half up to this point.
Flattening the top
I didn’t take any pictures while I was flattening the top. As I said previously, the top is already flat-ish. I didn’t have to grind anything away with the angle grinder, but rather started removing wood with the electric plane immediately. That still takes a while, though. The wood is 12″ wide and the plane can cut at most 3″ at a time. At 1/16 inch per pass. That’s a minimum of 32 passes with the plane to go down 1/2″. I had to take off a little more than that. All told, I probably ran the planer over the top at least 50 times before I had it flattened to my satisfaction.
Which brings up the question of why I flatten the top of the bowl. After all, I’m going to carve away most of it. Why spend all that time making sure it’s flat?
There are two reasons.
First, if I want the sides of my bowl to be even–the same height all the way around–it’s a whole lot easier to accomplish if they start that way. Leveling the top of a bowl once it’s carved is tedious: first I have to get them approximately even, then take it to the sanding table to get them perfectly even. Then I have to carefully shape the edges. Unless I want the bowl to have a flat top rim. But that brings up other considerations that I’ll save for another time.
Even though I don’t typically want my bowls to have perfectly level top edges, I still flatten the top of the bowl before I begin carving. The two pictures below show why.
To support the bowl while I carve the outside, I attach a floor flange to the top. On a separate board that’s clamped to my workbench, I’ve attached another floor flange into which I’ve threaded a 10-inch-long, 1-1/4″ galvanized pipe nipple. Then I turn the bowl blank over, thread the flange onto the pipe, and screw it down. It’s quite an effective holding jig. I find it ideal for carving bowls.
If you want to build something like this, be sure to get the right length of pipe so that it positions the bowl at a good carving height for you. You should prefer a longer pipe over a thicker base, although your base should be at least 1″ thick. And use four screws in both pipe flanges. You want that piece of wood to be held as securely as possible. It’s probably safe with three, but why not go ahead and put the fourth one in there? I use 1-1/4″ or 1-5/8″ (whichever is convenient at the time) #9 outdoor decking screws. Unless of course the bowl blank isn’t that thick.
According to the timestamps on the photos, it took me 30 minutes to flatten the top and mount the bowl on the carving stand. Call it two hours, total time, up to this point. Time to start carving.
Shaping the outside
I hear from time to time about people who hollow the bowl before shaping the outside. I don’t know how they do it. I’d be afraid of taking too much off and breaking through because I can’t easily determine just where the inside of the bowl is. More importantly, once the bowl is hollowed out, how the heck do they hold the thing still so they can carve the outside? I know how it can be done, but it’s a whole lot more difficult than my simple pipe flange holding jig.
The first thing I do before I start carving proper is remove the bark. For removing bark, I prefer the coarse carbide disc you see in the picture above. I picked it up at Harbor Freight for something like $10. It removes bark in bigger chunks than does my normal carving disc, and seems to go faster. When it comes to bark, bigger chunks are definitely better. For some reason I find bark dust extremely annoying. Weird, I know, but there it is. I didn’t use this grinding wheel to remove bark from the bottom of the bowl because I couldn’t find it. Turned out it was in the drawer where it was supposed to be, just buried under something else.
I carved my first few bowls, outside and inside, with this exact type of disc. It’s possible, but there are much better carving discs. Especially for hollowing. But if you’re severely budget constrained, you can make it work.
After removing the bark, I changed out the disc and started shaping. I don’t usually have an exact shape in mind at this point. I know generally what I want, but I’m open to improvisation, although there wasn’t much improv involved this time. I rounded the ends and shaped the sides so that they’re more planer than curved: almost flat. I’m not at all concerned with making the bowl perfectly symmetrical with both ends shaped the same, sides perfectly straight and at the same angle, etc. I can appreciate that kind of precision, but I find trying to do it very stressful. I like the look of an irregular bowl.
Without an exact design, I move around the carving, slowly removing wood and turning sharp edges into gentle curves. The disc I use (picture left) is very aggressive and necessitates a light touch. I never let the full weight of the grinder bear on the disc. Doing so would take a deep bite that could easily go deeper than I want. It’s also a whole lot easier to control the angle grinder when taking thin cuts. If I go deep enough, that disc could get stuck in the wood and rip the angle grinder right out of my hands. That, as they say, would be bad.
Pictures in the gallery above show the bowl after I finished rough shaping with the carving disc. My goal at this point is to have the bowl in its final shape. I’ll do a lot of smoothing, which will change the shape a little bit, but what you see here will be pretty much the bowl’s final shape.
Picture timestamps tell me that shaping took about 40 minutes. I’m about two and a half hours into the project.
A note about angle grinders
Angle grinders, by the way, seem to come in two flavors: those with slide switches and those with trigger switches. Having used both, I much prefer the trigger switch models. From an ergonomic standpoint, I find that they fit my hand better. I can use a trigger switch grinder longer with less fatigue than I can a slide switch model. More importantly, the trigger switch is easier to turn off: just let go of the trigger. There is a trigger lock so that I don’t always have to be holding the switch. When engaged, I have to squeeze the trigger again to disengage the lock. Squeezing the trigger briefly is a whole lot easier and faster than reaching with my thumb to turn off a slide switch model. You’ll pay a little bit more for a trigger switch model, but I think it’s money well spent.
Don’t skimp on your angle grinder. I know you can get a slide switch model for $20 or $25 at Harbor Freight. I’ve bought, used, and burned up many such. I got tired of buying a new grinder every year or two. Even their “high quality” model that cost $30 lasted only a year and a half. I bought that Ryobi angle grinder you see in the picture above for about $60 eight or ten years ago and I’ve carved dozens of bowls with it. More comfortable to use and lasts longer seems like a good deal to me.
Smoothing the outside
I do like that carving disc. It makes quick work of rough shaping, but it leaves a pretty rough surface. In addition to being rough, the surface is uneven; there are a lot of small low spots that I need to eliminate. There are several ways I could smooth the surface. I’ve tried hand scraping, hand sanding, and flap wheels on the angle grinder. All work, but I prefer the angle grinder because it’s faster.
In keeping with the Coarsest Tool Principle, I do initial smoothing with a 36-grit flap wheel on the angle grinder. Although I could do some shaping with the flap wheel, ideally all I’m doing is removing tool marks and low spots from the surface. After smoothing with the 36-grit flap wheel, I do it three more times using 60, 80, and 120-grit flap wheels. I could probably get away with just 60 and 120, not even using the 36-grit wheel. But it only takes a few minutes for each smoothing pass and by the time I’m done I’m reasonably sure that there aren’t any deep tool marks left in the wood.
In the first picture you see the rasp plane that I used to finish flattening the bottom of the bowl. That thing makes a pretty quick job of flattening the bottom, but leaves deep gouges in the wood. I can eliminate them on my sanding table, but if I learn how to operate a hand plane (i.e. one with a blade), I won’t have to spend as time at the sanding table.
In the second picture you can see there are some small flat areas. I’ll remove those with sandpaper.
Timestamps tell me that I took another 45 minutes to flatten the bottom and smooth the sides. I think I probably got interrupted in the middle of that, but perhaps not. Total time to this point is three and a half hours.
Sanding the outside
The primary reason I sand the outside now is convenience: it’s a whole lot easier to sand the outside of the bowl when it’s being securely held on the carving stand. I’ll have to do much of that over again after filling the cracks, but that’s okay. Sanding now gives me a uniform surface to work from, reducing the amount of sanding I have to do while fighting to keep the carved bowl still on the workbench.
I’ve recently changed two things about how I sand these bowls. First, I sand wet even at the coarsest grits. Water helps prevent the sandpaper from clogging. It also softens the wood, making it easier for the sandpaper to cut. I’ve found that I do a better job of sanding, and take less time to do it, when I use water. Sandpaper with a waterproof backing is a bit more expensive, but I consider it money well spent.
Averaged across all the grits I use, sandpaper costs me about a buck a sheet. The way I cut the sandpaper, one sheet provides three pieces that fit well in the hand. Sanding the outside of this bowl, I used 4 pieces, one each of 60, 80, 100, and 120-grit. That’s one and one-third full sheets of sandpaper, or about $1.33. By the time I’m done with the bowl, sanding inside and outside after carving, and then sanding up to 220 grit after filling the cracks, I will have used maybe four full sheets of sandpaper. And this is a big bowl. Sandpaper isn’t a huge expense.
The other change to my sanding process is the addition of gloves. Specifically those work gloves with the rubber (nitrile? whatever) fingers. And the reason I wear gloves now is because my fingers started bleeding when I was working on a bowl a few weeks ago. It takes time to do a good job sanding, and all that time while I’m sanding the wood I’m holding on to the sandpaper. My fingers would be sore the next day, but I just chalked that up to the cost of making something pretty. But bleeding fingers is too much.
I spend a lot of time sanding at this stage. I want to make sure that I have removed all of the tool marks, and all of the low spots and small flat spots are gone. To help in doing a good job, I’ve developed a little system. I start sanding at one end of the bowl and move clockwise around it, making sure to cover every inch of surface. It’s pretty surprising how well my fingers can find low spots and flat spots, even through the gloves. And of course my eyes are there looking for irregularities, too.
After completing a trip around the bowl, I do it again, but counter-clockwise. One reason I switch directions is simply to spread the load: when moving clockwise, my left hand is doing the sanding. When I’m moving counter-clockwise, the right hand is occupied. The other reason I do it is so I can see the wood from two different perspectives.
For each grit, I move around the bowl three times (sometimes more) in alternating directions. I also vary the starting direction at each grit. I want to make sure that each hand does approximately half the work, and I want to avoid any kind of bias in my procedure that would cause me to miss something.
I’ll be the first to admit that I probably spend more time sanding at this point than I really have to. That’s okay. I’d rather spend more time now so that I don’t find myself having to back up a few grits when I’m sanding away at 180 grit and discover a scratch that requires 100-grit sandpaper to remove. Backing up and re-sanding is a huge pain in the neck. Especially, as I mentioned before, when the bowl is no longer securely held on the carving stand.
Another nice thing about wet sanding is that it gives me an idea of how the piece will look when finished. The oil finishes I use (usually tung oil or linseed oil) don’t color the wood, but they do give it a wet look. Getting the wood wet with water approximates the color of those finishes very well.
I wasn’t surprised to find that sanding took a long time. Picture timestamps say that it was an hour and fifty minutes from the last picture I took of the smoothed bowl and the first picture of the wet sanded bowl. I took a break in there to wolf down a snack and do a couple of minor chores before I started sanding. If I were to guess, I’d say it was about 20 minutes
At this point the outside of the bowl is carved and sanded. From the time I first put the log on the workbench up to now is right at five and a half hours. I have another half hour of cleanup to do (putting tools away, etc.). Call it six hours, total, to go from a raw log to a bowl that’s shaped but not hollowed. Understand, though, that this bowl is quite a bit larger than what I typically carve. My bowls are usually 16 or 18 inches long, 7 to 10 inches long, and 3 to 4 inches deep. This bowl is half again as large. Perhaps more than that.
I took a few pictures of the bowl standing upright on the workbench. I think this will look nice after I hollow the inside.
You can see in these pictures that I didn’t get the top of the bowl perfectly flat. If I were concerned about that, I could spend a little bit more time making it flat and, if I were really concerned, level with the bottom. But that’s not the look I’m going for with this bowl. I think it’ll look just fine the way it is.
