For me, the advantage of an oil/beeswax finish is that when utilitarian bowls are washed the finish comes off, after which a patina develops with use as it does on a wood chopping or serving board, wooden plate, wooden salad bowl, or cup. On pieces that won’t get wet, the oil/beeswax is a good base for ongoing care and regular polishing that can build to a glossy patina in a few months. My observation is that hard finishes and sealers eventually crack, look terrible, and need refurbishing, whereas my bowls tend to look better with age, use, and ongoing care.

If only it was as easy as you make it appear. That dish would take me 2 hours and be half as nice. Great work!

Still making it look easy Richard eh,keep up the good work.cheers Colin bagpiper.

The steep bevels on the right wing of my asymmetric gouges let me cut right into centre, but generally I feel I have more control of the shape across the bottom third of the inside of a bowl using scrapers. When the grain refuses to be scraped clean I'll use a gouge, but I try to select blanks that don't present such problems.

Thanks Richard.

Open-grained timber usually needs an oil to fill the pores, where beeswax is all that's required on dense timbers. I'm not interested in hard shiny surfaces.

Thank you for this I'm going to follow your wise advice

The jaws clamp around 128mm/5". These are my chucks: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/p7F8ndemm9SWn2w.html

@@RichardRaffanwoodturning thank you Richard

You see the extractor in kzfaq.info/get/bejne/qt2leahikpzVcmQ.html. It's a small unit.

@@RichardRaffanwoodturning Thank you. I have the same size motor. I just need to modify/ build a better hood so it is more efficient

@@cobberpete1 The fewer bends and flexible hose the better.

It's not too dissimilar.

@@RichardRaffanwoodturning Thank you. Nice turn.

Rice bran oil is an excellent finish for anything utilitarian that's going to be used for food and washed.

There's a video on sharpening the shear scraper in the Tools and Sharpening playlist: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/p82klbBk1ZPQmI0.html

Figured it would be there somewhere. Thanks again Richard.

On a utilitarian bowl I like a rim to feel good as well as look good, so no sharp edges. Aso, sharp edges tend to break easily. Commercially, plates and bowls without a well-defined inner lip on the rim are far more difficult to sell, suggesting that people feel that food is likely to fall from plates and bowls without a defined working space. So I usually go for a well-defined detail that defines the working area of the bowl or plate. On a plate this can be as simple as a small groove that does nothing to contain anything, but works visually and psychologically. Here the shallow cove on the rim makes for a better defined inner lip. Sanding: sanding disks are far more expensive than cloth backed abrasives, so I power sand only when and where there's a real benefit, and that's mostly on the inside of bowls, especially controlling the curve into centre where it's very easy to let a bump develop when hand sanding. Power takes care of that.

boom boom