Drawing the Dimensions of a Bowl Blank in a Log

Video Transcript

"In this series I am going to show you how to find your bowl blank in the log. Now we've already cut our log and I've already split the log in half down the pith. The pith is the center of the tree right through here and that's how the tree gets its nutrients. We don't take a bowl blank from the hole log, we cut a bowl blank from the half log because if we did it from a whole log we would have the pith running in the center of our bowl and the pith when it dries it will crack and your bowl will crack. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take my half log and I'm going to pick the one that I'm going to use for my bowl blank and I'm going to use this one here and I'm going to draw the circle after I've checked to make sure that I don't have any defects or cracking in the bowl blank that I need to be aware of and to try to compensate for. This log looks pretty good. I don't see any cracks. I don't see any defects or nails or pieces of wire or things like that so I'm going to find my blank, center, and I will draw my circle once I find my blank. And I'm scribing this with a carbide tip on my compass and then I'll go over it with a marker. I want to scribe it because as I am doing this and just in case I happen to change my mind about where my lines are, I won't get confused because there are two or three different markings with a magic marker."