Making A Snowman

Making A Snowman 9 comments

I’m not a turner … but I do know something about a router.

Routed bowls. Challenge accepted.

You start with a sandwich of wood: the template screwed into the blank on top, and the wood glued up underneath. The total blank is 19″ x 12″ for this piece. The blank is about 2-1/2″ thick, with a top layer of walnut and a bottom layer of 8/4 red oak.

Use a drill press and a forstner bit to “hog out” the waste inside the shape of the bowl.

Here’s the beginning. The yellow funnel is for the dust collection system, which sucks away the debris during the drilling.

Lots of holes. Go slow; I used a 1-1/2″ bit, so I was removing a lot of waste with each hole.

Here’s the snowman, drilled out to reveal the walnut top and the red oak bowl underneath.

Clamp the bowl down so you can route the bowl shape using a router.

The router has an oversized lexan baseplate installed for this operation.

The cutting edge of the router bit removes the waste while a bearing above the cutters rides on the template to guide the operation.

Carefully follow the template to remove the waste and leave a smooth edge.

Keep the feed rate steady … slow enough to get good results and fast enough to not burn the wood.

Route down to the finished depth of the bowl. Be careful to now route too deeply … ruining the bowl and biting into into the workbench.

Take off the template and trace the outer edge of the bowl.

Use a bandsaw to slice away the wood that isn’t the bowl.

Here’s the head of the snowman after sanding and finishing with walnut oil.

You can never just make just one. Most of these pieces are walnut and red oak. The 4 section bowl is walnut and hard mable. The all brown small, oblong bowls are koa.

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