Some time back, I posted a "Want To Buy" in the Classified looking for a Bowl Adze. The reason is that a friend of mine is doing some major renovations on his house and he gave me a piece of wooden beam about three feet long that was removed from his house during the renovation. It's construction lumber, probably fir, and it had a lot of nails in it. Once I got the nails out, I decided to use it to make a boat bowl - just because I thought it would be an interesting project.
I did get a bowl adze but it was slow work on seasoned lumber so I resorted to drilling out most of the waste in the bowl with a Forstner bit and working the rest with carving gouges (I think the adze works best on green wood).
On the outside, I used a portable power planer to rough shape the sides and then carving gouges to do more shaping. Then I sanded with very coarse sandpaper and actually did some minor shaping with the sanding.
Here's how it came out. I had to cut about two inches out of the center of the beam because of knots, and then glue the two pieces back together. You can see a lot of nail holes in the wood.
It's certainly not any award winning piece but it was interesting to work on. It's about 19 inches long, 10 inches wide and 3 1/2 inches high.
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