This evening, I got a couple hours in the shop. Set up the laser-guided hollowing rig and took the bowl down to a little over a quarter inch. I had been aiming for ⅛ inch (3mm) but the wood just wasn’t solid enough, and I chickened out.

After hollowing, I could see that the big crack (the inside part of the bark inclusion, just hidden in the photo above) wasn’t completely filled on the inside, so I guess I was lucky I stopped hollowing when I did. When I was sawing off the tenon from the bottom, I heard a crack, but stopped and did some filling with cosmetic mica and CA glue, which solidified things a bit.

Of course, some CA glue got where it shouldn’t, so I needed to make a skinny, curved card-scraper to remove the excess glue from inside the bowl. And if you look at the photo below, you’ll see where some gray sanding dust got pushed into the grain. I’ll be cleaning that up with the scraper too. The little rotary bowl sanders will sometimes do that, especially with epoxy dust. You can see it downstream of the epoxy in the photo above, too.

I think I’ll also inspect all the cracks that are now visible from the inside of the bowl, and make sure they’re all filled if possible. It’s going to be fussy work, but that’s ok. There’s also a tiny divot in the epoxy visible in the second photo. I’m going to need to decide if I’m going to fix that, and how. Maybe a little file work will be the ticket. Or maybe I’ll just leave it.

Once I was done with the patching and some sanding, I finished sawing off the tenon and used a #3-25mm in-cannel gouge to clean that up. Of course the gouge was new from Ashley Iles, and I hadn’t done the initial sharpening on it, so that took some time too. I was kind of shocked at just how dull it was from the factory. Tsk.

Oh, the sides, as I said, are a bit over ¼ inch thick. The bottom is about ½ inch. Hopefully I can get most of the hand-sanding done tomorrow, and start finishing. I would’ve rather finished it on the lathe, but maybe I can still do that with a jam-chuck.