Frank Howarth+

My first hollow form

I have been wanting to play around with woodturning hollow forms. This is a form that is similar to woodturning a bowl except that the opening at the top is very small so it makes a form that is more hollow than it is open. I received a delivery of fir and maple wood a couple of years ago and I have been slowly turning that wood. I started with a piece of fir and an old hollowing tool that I had bought years and years ago that had just been sitting on the shelf waiting for me to pick it up. This attempt was successful but not as hollow as I would have liked. The opening was somewhere between w

Upgrades to the CNC

I've made some upgrades to the CNC machine. Avid CNC sent me some new parts to install. The biggest change is upgrading the control box and the control software. I'm going from Mach 4 to CNC 12. This new control software should be more stable than Mach 4 was, and I'm finding this to be true. I also changed the computer that runs the software. Because this computer is much smaller, I cut down my computer cabinet to a lower height. Now really only the screen sits above the work surface. I like this better as it doesn't block the view of the CNC machine from where I'm sitting at the computer. Som

Most Complicated Ornament Yet

For this year's Christmas ornament I thought I would make a wreath, and in making this form, I thought I would make a wood turned torus. I decided I would add stripes to make it appear like a candy cane design. I use the sticks from the PDX airport flooring project to make a wood turned segmented torus. I made 73 12 segmented rings that I cut a 5° angle in and stacked these rings together to make the torus. I then cut it into six pieces and added a striped ring in the space between the cut pieces of the torus. I glued everything back together again and that gave me a stripe candy cane pattern

Wood Flooring Turned Mallets

I have made more mallets. I have found a new source for wood to make the mallets. This wood was destined for the Portland airport renovation. A good friend of mine owns The Zena Forest Products that also makes the wood flooring tiles for the new airport renovation. I was able to scavenge a dumpster full of the rejected pieces for this flooring. I have glued these pieces together to make the heads for a series of Carver's mallets. The mallets also use the radial finger joint I've been using in the past to connect the head of the mallet with the handle of the mallet. Once the blank for the malle

What is the Point of this Bowl?

I had a maple bowl blank that I made in 2012. This bowl blank had a lot of material on the bottom part of the bowl and I thought it would be good to try something I've been thinking about for a while. I wanted to add legs to the bottom of a bowl. I used a radial box joint that I cut on the CNC machine to add three walnut legs. I then carved the excess material away forming three pointy legs. It looks a little spooky but I like it. Tools used in this project can be found at http://www.frankmakes.com/ To see upcoming projects follow me on social media Patreon https://patreon.com/user?u=16151

How I Fixed My Kitchen Mixer

I fixed my KitchenAid mixer. Last spring, my mixer stopped being able to mix any thick dough. It would “chatter” as it tried to mix. I watched a few videos on how to fix a KitchenAid mixer and felt I could do it. I also found the parts I would probably need. I pulled the top off of the mixer and got to the gears and the motor. I found a gear that was definitely stripped. Five or six teeth were missing on the gear. I was able to order this exact gear and replace it with new grease. I also found a pin that goes through the shaft that holds the main gears in the mixer. This pin was broken so I ma

Making A Garden Storage Cabinet

I've made an outdoor garden storage cabinet in our carport. We had an area in our carport that was just filling up with garden tools and garden paraphernalia. I wanted to tidy this area up. I had some pieces of poplar and some free plywood I had obtained that I used to make the cabinet. I made the sides and top out of rail and style frames. The back is a sheet of 1/2-in plywood. I made a base out of a frame of poplar that the whole cabinet sits on. I attached adjustable feet to the base so I could keep everything level as the floor of the carport slopes away from the house for drainage. I also

Making An Ornament (2024)

This year's Christmas ornament is a sphere with a top and bottom finial. The sphere has 24 segments running from top to bottom, making a striped pattern. In the sphere, I have three accent pieces which are circles each made from a 12 segmented piece. Two of them are a star pattern and the third is a little bit of an experiment with a more random pattern. The main body of the sphere is made from maple and walnut stripes. The accent pieces are made with plum and holly wood. The top and bottom finials are made from walnut. I like this ornament because it is playful and also looks familiar. Tools

Making Jar storage

I have been canning a lot of tomatoes over the past few years. I now have a lot of jars both empty and filled with tomatoes and other things. I need a place to store all of these jars. I found a wall in the back of our basement that seemed like a good place to make a thin but very dense wall of shelves for my jars. Last winter, we cut down a pine tree just outside the house. I cut the trunk of that tree into slabs and feel that the wood is now dry enough for this project. I made five bays of shells. Each bay is two vertical pieces with dados that receive the shelves that hold the jars. Each sh

wood tuning a fir bowl

I acquired a free load of fir from a tree not too far away from us. I got a couple of nice logs that I slabbed from this lot. I also got several shorter pieces of fir. I cut them in half to make bowl blanks. I have woodturned two of them into nice sized bowls. In this video, I go through the process without very many edits. You see most of what I do to go from a short log to a finished bowl. The one difficulty I had was getting a good surface on the green fir. I ended up just woodturning with a very sharp 40/40 bowl gouge and not trying to sand the surface. I finished the piece with walnut oi

Fast cherry bowl

I have made a small cherry bowl with a racing stripe. I rough turned this bowl years ago and it has dried into an oval shape with a tiny bit of bark intrusion in one spot. To finish this bowl, I cut it in half along that bark intrusion and added two strips of maple and one strip of walnut wood between the two halves. I then glued the strips and the two halves of the bowl back together again. Then I wood turned the piece into a final bowl with a racing stripe. Tools used in this project can be found at http://www.frankmakes.com/ Avid CNC: https://www.avidcnc.com/ Carter and Son Toolworks: htt

Spike the Bowl

I've made a bowl with spikes on the outside. I used the detail that I use on my carvers mallets to attach the spikes to the bowl. This entails carving a radial joint on the CNC machine. Half the joint is on the end of a piece of walnut and the other half on the cherry bowl. The two pieces are glued together. This bowl has 15 spikes. Once the two parts are glued together, I then have to carve the walnut and the cherry to reveal the pattern in the joint between the two pieces. I really like how it turned out. It's a simple round bowl on the inside and a very spiky, pointy surface on the outside.

Coffee Table Makeover

We decided the coffee table I made a little over a year ago wasn't quite big enough. My idea to enlarge the coffee table was to cut the coffee table in half lengthwise and add another piece to the width. Luckily, I had another piece of wood from the same tree, so the piece that I added matched very well. I also reshaped this new piece to match the curvy shape of the underside of the table. The other thing we wanted to do was make a more interesting top for the table. I thought about a couple of different designs. One being two pieces of wood with a curved seam between the two. Another being a

Making Mars out of Cherry

I have made the planet Mars from a dodecahedron made out of cherry wood. The dodecahedron is made out of pentagons that have the terrain of Mars carved into them. I put the pentagons together to make the sphere of the planet. I did a similar project about the moon a few months ago and in that project I had trouble keeping the seams between the pentagons small. In this Mars project, I was able to hold the pentagons with a mortise and tenon on my table saw jig. This allowed me to cut the angle between the different pentagons along the sides of each pentagon by holding them from the center instea

Making A Tomato Trellis #woodworking #diy #trellis #tomatoes #Making #woodworking #gardening

I have built a new trellis for the tomato plants. After experimenting with several different methods last year for holding up tomato plants, I think the best way to do it is to build a tall frame that holds strings that one branch of tomato plant can be clipped to. With this method you can grow the plants closer together and there's lots of air flow around each plant. Also the plants are held up nice and tall so they all get plenty of sun and grow very nice tomatoes. #woodworking #diy #trellis #tomatoes #Making #woodworking #gardening