Spalted Maple Bowl - Enclosed Form

Spalted maple is similar to ambrosia maple in that both are colored from fungus that is allowed to attack the wood while it's kept moist and near room temperature. The difference is that spalted maple is just randomly attacked by fungus however it is introduced, whereas ambrosia maple is attacked from the fungus introduced by the ambrosia beetle into the holes it bores. You get completely different coloration patterns. This Spalted Maple Bowl has dark spots throughout, and a large stain on the bottom of the piece. Maple is a popular wood for woodturning because it is smooth and closed grained and hard. And it smells great when you cut and sand it - faintly of maple syrup.

Really thought it's the enclosed form of this bowl that gets interest. People keep asking if it was hard. Of course it's hard...but not terribly. Still, each project has its own challenges. With this one, one challene was how to hollow it out without specialized hollowing equipment. In the end it went quite well. The other challenge was sanding the inside - sticking your fingers in through a 3" opening with a sharp edge on a lathe spinning at 1200 RPM is a little troublesome - the sandpaper would catch and my fingers would get bounced around inside the rim like a marble in a bowl that you're shaking - ouch. So I didn't spend as much time sanding the inside as I would like. They make specialized tools for both jobs, but unless someone orders enough of these to cover the cost, I'm doing it the old hard way - hence the extra charge for enclosed forms.
Still, a fun project.


Enclosed bowls are the price of the wood plus $1.50 per square inch of profile. This bowl would be about $28 plus shipping.