You’ve seen pieces of wood get mixed with resin and turned into kitchen pieces before, but here’s one you can actually use to help with your cooking.
Using a piece of old cherry tree burl and some blue resin, YouTube channel gavel coulee woodworking has crafted a resin bowl as smooth as the concoctions you’ll make in it:
To start things off, he puts the large cherry burl inside a used tub of ice cream and fills it with blue resin. Once the resin settles, he puts on the lid, seals it in a vat, and leaves the resin to harden.
He removes the resin-encased burl from the ice cream container and pops it onto a lathe. This is where the fun begins. Using a special chipper, he starts cutting and smoothening out the burl into the bowl it was meant to be.
After beginning at the bowl’s base, he slowly moves outward and works on smoothening the edges of the bowl to give it a rounded, almost ball-like appearance.
With the body finally taking shape, he can start cutting the indentation which will eventually become the bottom of the bowl. He does a couple of passes with the lathe before sanding the indentation off-screen up to 400-grit sandpaper.
After the sanding, he cleans the burl for a bit before applying some sanding paste. He follows this up with a good helping of polish and restoring paste to give it a nice sheen.
Satisfied with the bottom side, he flips the burl around and starts chipping away at the top portion to make the most important part of the bowl: the part which actually holds stuff. Resin and wood shavings litter his workshop as he carves out the inside. Every now and then, he pauses to examine his handiwork and to make sure none of the resin or wood has chipped off by mistake.
Just like the bottom part, he sands down the inside using up to 400-grit sandpaper before cleaning it, applying some sanding paste, and finally, some polishing/restoring paste.
The only thing left to do now is clean up the bowl and it’ll be ready to store fruits, vegetables, soups, or whatever else you may need a resin-casted bowl for. As with most pieces of wood cast in resin, the mixture of the resin and the polish bring out a sort of earthy feel to an otherwise boring-looking piece.
More of gravel coulee woodworking‘s woodturning projects can be found on his YouTube channel, so be sure to check them out!
