Thread: A few Christmas Gifts

In between renovating a bathroom at the back of the house - I have managed to get a bit of time in the shed over the last couple of weeks to turn a few bowls which will be sent out tomorrow as Christmas gifts. Fortunately there is an abundant source of various suitable timbers within a pretty close radius of where I live, and it is never too difficult to go out and collect some nice pieces to turn.

Firstly - a Banksia pod. These I do have to travel a bit further to the West to collect. They do not occur around here, but can readily be found on or inland from the west coast. I have made a variety of things using them in the past - this time a simple vase with a glass test tube inside it (I have a couple of boxes full of test tubes from a laboratory clean-out at the last gold mine I was working at).

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Next are two bowls and a platter turned from the local variety of gidgee. I cut this tree down in my son's front yard three years ago as it was dropping branches onto the street and footpath. Have not much left of it now, but have recently been offered another tree by a neighbour who wants one removed from his backyard so that he can build a shed.

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The next three are turned from Salmon Gum, the most commonly burnt firewood in this part of the country. These trees are prolific in this region, and some very nice grain pattern can be found, particularly around forks & defects in the tree.

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I love finding bits of timber which have nice grain patterns as well as some cracks / holes / voids, and casting the blanks in epoxy resin before turning. Both the gidgee and the salmon gum timber are very good in this respect, often with deep cracking right through a piece of timber and, in the case of salmon gum, black gum / sap inclusions which can be removed and filled with resin under pressure. makes for some interesting results.

The final two bowls are turned from the local variety of Blackbutt. While I haven't found any of this where I normally go looking for timber to the east of Kalgoorlie, I did find some just out of Coolgardie, about 40km to the west of here. It was in a long windrow of trees that had been pushed over to clear land for a mine tailings dam - most of this windrow consists of Salmon Gum, but there is a bit of Blackbutt in there as well if you look for it (there's also a lot of native bees in some of the downed trees which do not take kindly to being disturbed by some old bugger with a chainsaw).

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Going to have a crack at making some pepper grinding mills next, using some of the local timber which I think will be ideally suited. Received some crush grind mechanisms from CWS this week, and also a forstner bit extender from Carbatec, so looking forward to trying something new. Already have a couple of interesting blanks for these sitting out in the shed.