Is it me or do others have problems with bowl blanks from WOODCRAFT. The last threee blanks I have gotten from them have 1, warpped, 2 cracked, and the last one just blew up as I was turning it. Just your basic 4" by 2-1/2" blank, it still had a 3/8" wall when both cross grain sides blew out. This was a Blank that I got about 4 months ago and it has been sitting in my HOT shed for all that time.
Hello Marty,
Most purchased bowl blanks are not fully dried. They are generally sealed to hopefully keep them from cracking. When you turn them into a bowl, it is best to rough turn them to 10 percent of the diameter as wall thickness and them put them in a paper bag for a couple of months, hopefully not in a hot shed. Your bowl probably had a lot of stress built up in it from storage in the hot shed. When you then turned it, you released the areas that were holding it together and it simply flew apart. It is not Woodcraft that is to blame. It is they way you are handling them.
Fred Holder
Not particularly good storage conditions. As such, may not have much to do with woodcraft. A dry hunk of wood is never bone dry unless it's been cooked in an oven and not exposed to air after that - so even if this was a "dry" blank, cooking it in a hot shed is likely to make it shrink, move and possibly crack. If you have blanks from 3 other suppliers exposed to the same conditions for the same time and they don't have problems, then you might have a real issue with woodcraft - otherwise I think you have an issue with how you store your stock.
What the others said. Most of them won't be totally dry. Maybe dry enough to turn and finish, but wet enough so that they will warp. Any wood will move or 'adjust' as you remove bulk, even if it is dry. As far as the one that blew up, 2 possibilities. One is that you had a catch, and that caused the explosion. The other is that there was a flaw/crack in the wood that you didn't see, and it was the cause of the failure. I will inspect each bowl blank for cracks before and after I cut it out, then again after I have finished turned the outside. Most of the time if it is cracked, if I can't turn it out, I will burn it. Just not worth the effort to try to fix it. The super glue in the crack can help, but it still leaves a weak spot, so if you 'repair' it, still turn with extra caution. If you have a bark inclusion, super glue will not hold it together.
robo hippy
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