So, after that exercise, I deemed it in my best interest to learn more about turning wood in various stages of dryness. I must say that the very first time that I mounted a large green bowl blank, and those long beautiful curly shavings started to pour off my gouge, I was hooked! One of the best sources that I found was a book called "Turning Green Wood" by Michael O'Donnell. I like this book so much that I bought a small supply for anyone who couldn't find them in their local bookstore. It is available online at Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

Lumber is very difficult to dry in thick pieces, due to the length of time involved and the fact that in order to reduce cracking, the wood inside the block needs to dry at about the same rate as the outside of the block. Commercially, kiln dried lumber is usually not available thicker than 2″ and most often only as 1″. Basically, roughing out bowls allows a block of wood 3″ or 4″ thick to be reduced to about the thickness of 1″ lumber, only in the shape of a bowl. This reduces drying time dramatically, as well as checking or cracking. If you want to turn large bowls from solid timber, you must learn how to turn and season green wood.

How you season a rough-turned bowl is the subject of thousands of conversations and web posts. If you ask 50 turners how they do it, or the best way to do it, you will probably get 100 answers. The simplest and best place to start would be to take your rough-turned bowl off the lathe, put it into a brown paper sack or box and pack it in the shavings that were created while turning it. Now every few weeks you can check the weight of the rough-turned blank to see if it is still losing weight, once it no longer loses weight, it should be dry and ready to remount on your lathe to finish turning.

Being paraffin wax, it only sits on the surface of the blank, it does not penetrate into the pores of the wood. If you will be turning the blank, you can use a paint scraper to remove the majority of it. I use one of those carbide paint scrapers, they seem to stay sharp for a long time and the wax peels off of them with just your finger.

If you are going to use the blank for some other purpose, and you want to get the rest of the wax residue off, at this point you could use some sandpaper to get the last vestiges,  but beware, the wax gums up the sandpaper very rapidly.

A frequent question is 'Will this stop my blank from drying out?' The answer is no, but it will drastically slow it down. If you want to  speed up drying time, you can remove the wax from all four sides, but leave the wax on the ends. Since moisture escapes 90% more from the ends than it does the sides, this will speed up drying but eliminate most of the checking and cracking that we see from raw blanks. You may get some minor surface checking on the faces.

I will also use this venue to hopefully answer some of the questions we get. One of the most common questions we get is: How do I get the wax off of my blank before I turn it? Before we talk about getting it off, I guess we need to talk about getting it onto the wood.

Back in 2002 when I first started in this business of selling wood blanks, we were using AnchorSeal to coat the blanks. AnchorSeal was developed for loggers to paint the ends of freshly-cut logs to slow down any cracking of the logs. It turned out that this was a totally unsatisfactory solution for dealing with our turning stock. We were losing over 30% of our stock to cracking that was serious enough that the blanks were unusable. Its not good to have a blank fly apart on the lathe as you are turning it! I think all of us have experienced a blank flying off or at least getting crammed up on the lathe, you know how exciting that can be, or is it terrorizing? So in our search for another method to keep our loss to a minimum and give you a safer piece of turning stock, someone suggested that we try Paraffin Wax. 

After a lot of research and testing we found a wax that is clear, no coloring or scents. Lots of paraffin is sold to candle makers but that does not have the right qualities for our purpose. Next was learning how best to apply the wax, we tried painting it on the blanks, and we still do that to blanks that are too large to fit in our wax vat, or when we want to only paint a cut surface of a natural edge blank. We don't want the wax on the bark that you want to use to highlight your turning. What we discovered is what works best for us is a propane burner, commonly called a turkey cooker. We found a heavy-duty stand/burner that is sturdy enough to handle the constant jostling that we put it through. Next up was the kettle. We burned through the aluminum kettle that came with the cooker within months. We have to heat and maintain the wax at approx. 275 degrees to flow and dry almost instantly when we dip the wood blocks. We went to the Kitchen supply store and bought a heavy duty stock pot. It was about 16"  in diameter and would allow us to dip a block up to 12" x 5". That pot lasted a couple of years. At $100 per pot, we wanted something that would last us longer. We found a local company that builds commercial kitchen equipment and they built us a stainless steel pot 18" in diameter and 20" deep. It will hold about 60 pounds of wax with enough headspace to not overflow when we dipped a large blank into it. That kettle has lasted us for 6-7 years so far.

Next blog, we will deal with dealing with Paraffin.