Turning Wild Olive

[Bruce Lundgren]

I've admired some salt boxes that I've seen turned from olive wood. I bought two blanks about +/- 5X5 at the Tampa symposuim and started turning one last weekend. Moisture content was about 10 percent and I was surprised at how heavy the blank was. It reminded me of my lignum vitae {sp} mallet. I drilled a 5/8 center hole to finished depth.
The rough turning to cylinder went fine and then I started the end grain hollowing. My bowl gouge hardly cut anything so I switched to my Easy Rougher carbide tool taking little bites from the center hole outward. It worked much better but was still slow going. The growth rings are real close together and the wood is very dense. It was very slow going and the deeper I got the more difficult it got. I stopped at about 3 inches deep when I couldn't get the tool rest closer.
Anyone had a similar experience trying to turn olive? I'm almost tempted to wait until I get a hollowing system. Any thoughts/suggestions?

Thanks.
Bruce

[Steve Mawson]

Only Olive wood I have turned is pen blanks. It was rather soft. Know that does not help much.

[robert baccus]

I turned a 14" bowl several years ago. Extremely hard wood--left it quite thick and proud of it. Can you drill any more volume out of it--cheat any way you can on that stuff. Second hardest wood I ever tried to cut. One thing that complicates things is that many tropical are harder but usually have waxes or oils in the wood which really does help. It did roll up the edges of some good quality gouges.

[Bruce Lundgren]

Steve: I found the same thing with pen blanks which was what I sort of expected...boy was I wrong.

Robert: I'm not sure I can drill a bigger hole. Guess I could plug the existing hole and use a larger forstner bit. Good suggestion. The carbide cutter worked pretty well but I had to go very slowly taking small bites but the easy rougher was not stout enough as I got deeper.....maybe a good reason to order a hollowing system. We woodturners can justify anything when it comes to a new toy.

Thanks for the response guys.

[robert baccus]

You can probably use a forstner bit without a center pilot. Try tapering the existing hole at the mouth to guide the f. bit???