Dough Bowling

[Dodgy Loner]

Two years ago I made a big dough bowl for my in-laws for Christmas. My wife's Dad had always wanted one, and I earned major points with that gift :D. Traditional dough bowls are made of soft woods that are easily split, like tulip-poplar and cypress. One exception is tupelo butts - these are not easily split, but they make up for that with the ease with which they carve.

When I made the dough bowl for my in-laws, however, I made the mistake of using sweetgum. What a nightmare! Agonizing to carve, impossible to split, and the reversing grain made it practically impossible to get a smooth surface! Well, the bowl turned out nice anyway, so of course my wife wanted one too. No way I would use sweetgum again, though! I had to find the right piece of wood...

Last summer a big sassafras tree died in a friend's yard, and I knew just what I would make. I cut a short log in two and made a bench from one half. The other half has been sitting in my yard for over a year, waiting for me to find the time. Yesterday afternoon, I finally decided that it was time to work on my wife's Christmas present!

The work started with an axe and an adze. I used the axe to chop "stopping cuts" into either end, then split out the waste with the adze. This is why you want a wood that splits easily!


Then I used a big gouge and a mallet to smooth the sides and get the shaped I was after.


Next, I start working my way toward the ends with the axe, cutting away as much as I can without cutting into the parts that I want to keep. Again, I follow the axe with the gouge to smooth up the rough cuts.


Finally, I smooth the entire interior with the gouge, using only hand pressure, no mallet. I shoot for long, smooth strokes, because the cuts I leave will be the finished surface. I won't do any scraping or sanding at all. This is just about finished.


When the interior is done, it's time to start shaping the outside. The bulk of the work here is done with an axe. I used a hewing hatchet and adze quite a bit, too.


Once you get to the point where it's tough to work down the handles any closer with an axe, break out the saw and roughly saw them to shape.


Then it's off to the workbench. I begin to smooth out the axe work with the drawknife and jackplane.


Lot's of big, curly shaving during this part! I love working green sassafras 8)


Once the bowl is taken down to the appropriate thickness (I'm shooting for 3/4" to 1"), I begin to work the ends. First with the gouge and mallet, then a drawknife, and finally a spokeshave.


Still a good bit of work to do - I need to work on the ends a little more, and the rim needs to be leveled. Most of the work left will be in the handles. Lots of tricky angles and reversing grain once I get to that part. But I will be putting the project aside for a week or so to season before I progress any further. I spent about 4 1/2 hours yesterday taking the half-log to somewhat bowl-shaped object, and I anticipate that I will spend another 3 hours or so on the finishing touches.

[beenthere]

Very impressive and appreciate the sequence of pics.
The sweat would be pouring off my brow (and almost is just thinking about it).

Comes to mind that some chainsaw "carving" could have been employed to get some of the rough work done. With a wood that splits easily, I'd be fearful that at any moment a chop with the axe would cause a big split through the middle.

Look forward to pics of the rest of the work. 

[Dodgy Loner]

Might as well add to this thread rather than starting a new one.

My wife's family has an antique dough bowl. I have no clue how old it is, but it is old. The family house was built in 1854, if I recall correctly. The family farm has been passed down for longer than that. Anyway, this dough bowl is well-loved and well-used. Every Christmas Eve, they cook barbecue and low country boil, and they serve the low country boil in the dough bowl. It's a tradition that goes back as far as anyone remembers.

The dough bowl, unfortunately, has seen better days. I has big cracks, starting on either end, and running towards the middle. Last Christmas, I was honored to be given the task of repairing the bowl. Well, maybe not so much repairing as stabilizing to ensure that the cracks don't get any bigger and eventually break the bowl in two.

I talked about it with my wife's uncle and we agreed that some inlaid butterflies would be the ideal way to fix the bowl. I would normally cut the butterfly mortices with a router to get a flat surface and a chisel to finish it off, but there is not a single flat surface anywhere on the bowl. I let the bowl sit for eleven months, thinking I was going to have to figure out some complicated jiggery to make a flat surface for my router to do the work. Finally, with my deadline looming, I just said to heck with it and decided to do it all by hand.

I started off by making a big butterfly from which I could cut as many as I needed. I used walnut to contrast with the tulip-tree bowl.


I place the butterfly along the crack wherever I felt one was needed...


...And scribed around it with a marking knife.


I used a couple of Forstner bits to remove the bulk of the waste and tried to get an approximately flat bottom.


Then I used a chisel to cut to my lines and to flatten the bottom.


Because this bowl sees a lot of moisture (from the low country boil), I decided that epoxy was the appropriate choice for gluing in the butterflies.


Once dry, I trimmed the butterflies the the contours of the bowl with a chisel and smoothed it all up with a scraper. There is a stark different between the old wood and the scraped wood right now, but a few low-country boils will take care of that.


I realized when uploading the photos that I never did get a picture of the whole bowl. I ended up using 7 butterflies - 4 in the top and 3 in the bottom. Should be good to go for another 120 low country boils!

[Dodgy Loner]

Comes to mind that some chainsaw "carving" could have been employed to get some of the rough work done. With a wood that splits easily, I'd be fearful that at any moment a chop with the axe would cause a big split through the middle.

Thanks beenthere. I can assure, you, I am much more confident with an axe than I am with a chainsaw. Plus, the direction of the axe blows pretty much preclude any splitting, because I am mostly chopping across the grain, not parallel to it. When I was splitting out the interior with the adze, the stopping cuts that I made with the axe prevented the splits from propagating farther than I intended.

I used the chainsaw pretty extensively with the sweetgum dough bowl for my in-laws, and let's just say that I'm better at felling trees than I am at carving with a chainsaw . There were way too many places that I had to remove just a little more than I wanted to due to overcutting my lines!

[thurlow]

I love it:  I LOVE IT!  One question.........how do you keep the fras-a-sas from splitting?  I turn lots of candlesticks and I can never predict what's gonna happen;  sometimes stuff that's been drying for 5 years or more will split when I turn it down.  Sassafras is probably my favorite wood...........or at least in the top 10..........

[Sprucegum]

 8) Nice work  8)

I know we are never supposed to discuss food on this forum  :  :D but what is a "low country boil"? Why can't us folks in the high country have one?

[Tree Feller]

I'll bet that green Sassafras smelled good while working it!  Thanks for the pics and demonstration.

I also wondered about the green wood cracking and warping as it dries. I know on turned bowls that is a major issue. Is Sassafras a stable wood?

[PC-Urban-Sawyer]

8) Nice work  8)

I know we are never supposed to discuss food on this forum  :  :D but what is a "low country boil"? Why can't us folks in the high country have one?

Well, fusrt thang off, ya get yoself some crawdads....

[Holmes]

Nicely done. A very educational way to show that project. Who or where did you learn your craftsmanship from?

[Dodgy Loner]

how do you keep the fras-a-sas from splitting?  I turn lots of candlesticks and I can never predict what's gonna happen;  sometimes stuff that's been drying for 5 years or more will split when I turn it down.

Sassafras is not a difficult wood to dry without splitting in my experience. This log had been sitting out for almost a year and a half, and I only had to chainsaw an inch off the end to get rid of the checking. That's not to say that this bowl won't split, but I don't anticipate any problems. Getting the wood thin enough that it dries evenly is important. I also buried the bowl in the shavings that I made which will slow the drying. Also, if you leave any pith in the wood, it doesn't matter what precautions you take, it's gonna crack.

[Dodgy Loner]

8) Nice work  8)

I know we are never supposed to discuss food on this forum  :  :D but what is a "low country boil"? Why can't us folks in the high country have one?

Thanks! A low country boil is a traditional meal on the southeastern coast that consists of a big (BIG!) pot of red potatoes, corn-on-the-cob, sausage, and most importantly, shrimp -- seasoned and boiled to perfection!

[Dodgy Loner]

Nicely done. A very educational way to show that project. Who or where did you learn your craftsmanship from?

I learned a little from reading Roy Underhill and other authors, but mostly from trial and error (heavy on the error ;))

[thurlow]

I learned a little from reading Roy Underhill and other authors, but mostly from trial and error (heavy on the error ;))

Had a c-band dish for a lot of years and one of the things I miss since going to a small dish was catching Roy Underhill on the Denver PBS station;  I liked his programs, though at times he could get a little 'hyper'.  I seem to recollect him saying that sassafras was his favorite wood.

[Tree Feller]

I seem to recollect him saying that sassafras was his favorite wood.

At a now-defunct woodworking forum, the admin did a series of "10 Questions With..."

One of the woodworking celebrities he interviewed was Roy Underhill. This is what he said about question number one.

-----------------------------------------------------------
1. If you were allowed to use only one species of wood from this day forward, what would it be, and why?

Yow! This is like "What one woman would you spend the rest of your life with?" Oh- wait.... So, OK, Persimmon, she's so sweet but incredibly dense. Oak is a good friend and I wouldn't want to mess that up. Cherry - isn't. (don't need that.) Pine needs slow growth and I can't wait forever. Dogwood? She'll split on me just when things get serious. Maple is bipolar - either bland or crazy-grained. But now I'm thinking about walnut. She's got depth and polish but she's strong enough for most anything. She rives right and never treats me rotten. So walnut. It was a surprise to me too.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Roy is a great guy. He responded to the questions right away when many of the other "name" woodworkers never did at all.

[SwampDonkey]

Nice bowl your carving for the southern ho-down. ;D That's a lot of chipping and carving.  Nice repair job to on the heirloom bowl. Now you southern fellas have your dough bowls. Up here a similar bowl was used to wash butter taken from the churn. Then with a wooden ladle put into a simple wooden press to make 1 lb blocks of butter to be wrapped. I have one here that goes back to mid 1800's. I have another, the churn, the paddle, the press and the ladle that grand mother used to make a mountain of butter over the years. I have not lugged it home yet, it's at another house.

Here's my old butter bowl. ;D



It was carved from butternut wood which still grows in the area they settled. Butternut is very easy to carve and stable.

[WDH]

Somehow I missed this thread.  What a great couple of projects!  Inspiring  8).

[Dodgy Loner]

SD, your butter bowl looks an awful lot like our dough bowls! I remember stories of my great-grandmother using her bread bowl to make huge batches of biscuits - she didn't have a recipe, but knew exactly how the dough was supposed to feel. That takes a lot of biscuit-making! I would love to have some butternut to carve, but it's rather hard to come by in Mississippi. I wonder if the butternut seeds that I sent banjo-picker back when I lived in North GA have sprouted into trees that are big enough to harvest by now ??? ... Probably not. :D

Hopefully I will get a chance to work on the sassafras bowl a bit more this week

[SwampDonkey]

My grandmother's bowl was made from hard maple. Heavier and harder to carve of course. Hers had handles cut into the back round of the bowl. She actually called it a butter tray, as I recall. But it was like a bowl. If I remember right, it was her mother's. This one I have here was on grandfather's side.

[Dodgy Loner]

I finally put the finishing touches on my wife's Christmas present last night. It was eminently enjoyable work. She always tells me when I complete something that the project may be for her, but the time in the shop was her gift to me. I'll take it

Here is a comparison between the old poplar bowl and the sassafras bowl that it inspired


A closeup of the repaired split in the old bowl




I left all the gouge marks in the bowl. I like the way they look, but if we were actually planning to make bread in this bowl, I would need to smooth them out. Fortunately, my wife has a KitchenAid for making bread :D


Every cut and every facet is straight from the tool. No sandpaper or scrapers were harmed in the making of this bowl. I used 3 gouges of various shapes and sizes and a 1" chisel to do most of the shaping. The outside of the bowl I also used a spokeshave a good bit, and a hand plane to flatten the bottom.

[SwampDonkey]

That sure is nice carving and a lot of work to. I woulda guessed ash, but we all knew you was carving sassafras.  ;D

You make enough bread between now and your 60th anniversary and everything will smooth over with time. ;) ;D

[Axe Handle Hound]

Nicely done Dodgy!  I too would have left the gouge marks in the bowl.  They make it look authentic and handmade (which it clearly was).  Did you add your initials into it anywhere? 

[thurlow]

Looks GREAT!!  I've followed the thread, but without going back, can't remember if you've answered this;  how long had the sassafras been drying?

[WDH]

That is a one-of-a-kind piece.  What a wonderful gift!

[POSTON WIDEHEAD]

That is a one-of-a-kind piece.  What a wonderful gift!

;D

[Dodgy Loner]

Did you add your initials into it anywhere?

Not yet. Usually I sign my turned bowls with a sharpie. I asked my wife if she wanted me to sign this one, and she said "Only if you can carve it in." So that's what I will do

I've followed the thread, but without going back, can't remember if you've answered this;  how long had the sassafras been drying?

Well, the log was basically green when I started, although it had been cut for a year and a half. I did most of the hollowing and shaping in one day, then let it dry for about 3 or 4 weeks before finishing it up. It's not completely dry, but dry enough.