I had done only one green turning before but I liked how much easier it was than turning dry wood. On that one I just turned it to the finished size without any drying but it ended up cracking and well, kind of exploding off the lathe. Fortunately it was a very nice uniform explosion and I was able to glue the pieces back together with only the readers of these pages being any the wiser.

So with this one I read up on wood drying and came across the microwave oven technique. A few hours of microwave work seemed like a better solution than stashing it away for a year (or the crack/explosion one). But first, the tree needed to cut down and then up.

We've been in this house for 24 years so this particular tree must not have started growing until several years after we moved in. But there's little doubt it was a volunteer like the Caragana beside it. When it became large enough to notice, we wondered what kind it was until a few years ago when it started producing tiny crab apples like another much larger tree in our yard.

Until then it had blended in with the other vegetation but it kept growing and it became obvious that if left alone would get large enough to be too close to the fence and the neighbour's garage - it was probably already starting to drop apples in the eaves trough.

Here I've set up a ladder on the neighbour's side getting ready to cut it down. The tree in question is the one whose trunk is close to my head in this photo.

The tree was removed by trimming the long branches shorter and then cutting off the branches close to the trunk. Once all the branches were removed, the trunk was cut into manageable-sized pieces.

Most of the large branch and trunk cutting was done with a cordless reciprocating saw while branch shortening was handled with the long orange pole lopper I'm wielding in this photo. I did the cutting while Sue hauled the branches away to a pile on the other side of the yard.

It only took an hour or so to remove the tree. Another hour or so of manually cutting up the branches resulted in a small enough pile to fit into a vehicle for a trip to the city compost depot's Big Pile 'O Branches. Given the height of the tree, we were impressed how compact a bundle the cut-up branches made (maybe 2-3 ft diameter by 6 ft) but it weighed probably 80-100 lb, so it was a bit of a heave even with two of us to load it up.

This shows part of the pile of branches just after coming off the tree. I kept only the largest piece of the trunk, but that would be enough for 2 or 3 turnings.

I cut off a foot-long piece of the trunk and mounted it to the lathe as shown here. In this photo I've already started to remove the bark at one end.

The wood was mounted so it spun around the center of the growth rings at both ends. Those weren't quite in the middle of the trunk so in addition to just removing the bark the wood needed to be rounded a bit, resulting in a somewhat smaller diameter to work with.

I failed to take a photo of my nice pile of long shavings but a magnified view of the previous photo shows long curly shavings coming off the damp wood.

Since the diameter was a bit smaller than I'd hoped, I ended up making a shorter vessel to avoid having it too tall and spindly; hence the unused section adjacent to the blue baseplate.

The wood was rather crudely turned into an approximation of the finished shape, but with extra material to account for warping when the wood was dried.

The outside shaping was followed by hollowing the inside, again leaving much thicker walls than needed for the final version.

The high moisture level of the wood was evident in the long flexible shavings from turning and the fact that the wood felt quite cold to the touch (and presumably a moisture meter, if I actually had one). If turned to the final thin-walled shape when green the vessel could crack or warp as the thin walls eventually dried. To prevent this, it needed to be dried before being turned to the final shape. One technique is to pack the crudely-cut blank in sawdust until it naturally dries out, but I don't have that kinda time. OK, technically, I do have that kinda time, but I don't have that kinda patience; hence the microwave drying approach.

So the roughly-turned blank was taken off the lathe and had the baseplate removed in preparation for drying.

Here the weight of the wood is being recorded to monitor the drying process.

The wood blank was simply put in the microwave for heating. After some experimentation, I settled on 3 minutes at 50% power to heat up the wood to maybe 60 or 70 degrees with little danger of burning it.

I'm a big fan of actual mechanical buttons on the microwave but there's a very limited selection of those to be found. We ended up going with this one which has mechanical buttons and a large knob to set the time (admittedly with a cool blue glow). Unfortunately, the knob turns out to be much less convenient than any kind of number pad. Next time the priority will be a number pad...

I'm not sure it was necessary, but I put a fan on the wood to cool the outside and take away the moisture after it came out of the oven each time. The inside was even warmer so I added a hose from a blower to flow cool air to the inside for the same purpose. I cooled it for 4 or 5 minutes before putting it back in for the next 3 minute session of heating.

This shot shows the counter-top cooling/weighing station in action.

Initially the wood lost around 30 gm per heating session. The amount of weight (i.e. moisture) lost in each session dropped with time until after around three hours and 20 session the loss was only 2 gm. The weight started at 1030 gm and ended up at 690 gm for a 340 gm loss - a bit over a cup of water.

Once the wood was dry, I remounted it to the lathe. The hole pattern for the baseplate screws no longer fit due to shrinkage of the wood, so I used a different mount.

It was then a pretty simple matter to reshape the outside to the final contour. The shavings were much finer and lighter now that the wood was dry.

I left a raised ring of wood near the end to support the wheels of the steady rest used for hollowing. The ring would be removed after the hollowing was completed.

Then after hollowing the vessel and removing the extra ring of wood, the piece was as seen here, just needing the wood removed on the very bottom.

I did some hand sanding before moving to the next stage, although that turned out to be a bit premature.

To remove the bottom, I made a little jam chuck (the brown piece of wood in the black-jawed chuck) and reversed the piece. This let me access the bottom and here a small circular foot has been formed and the extra wood partially removed from the bottom.

I usually make an incised circle on the bottom for my initials and the year. I have a small jig to aid in this, but it is often difficult to position - it has to be glued or taped on securely which is often a challenge on a curved object. For this vessel, I made a new one that could be clamped on, simplifying matters.

Here I've got the new jig clamped and the vessel is ready to have the circle done.

This photo shows the finished bottom. I had centered the core of the wood blank on the lathe to put it in the center of the vessel, but the vessel bottom was a few inches further along. Presumably the core wasn't straight since it is distinctly off-center here.

So this was where I had envisioned the vessel being complete. Now I didn't take a photo of the full vessel at this point, but I thought it looked kind of plain. So instead of just going with that, I decided to carve some leaves into the top of the vessel.

I decided to carve the leaves in the shape of the ones on the actual tree, so I plucked a few from the "mother" tree in our yard and scanned them in to use as a guide.

With the leaf images up on the computer screen as a guide, I just drew leaf and stem shapes on the top of the vessel.

This shows one section of the leaf pattern. I numbered the quadrants 1 through 4 and then took photos so there would be a record of the pattern when the carving of a top leaf eliminated the lines for a lower-layer leaf.

However I now had this round vessel that was tapered at both ends, and how the heck am I going clamp it down for carving purposes?

After a failed try at carving a custom-fitted set of clamp blocks, I decided to make a contoured block for the bottom portion to lay sideways in and then use a ratchet strap.

This photo shows a don't-try-this-at-home setup to contour a block that will cradle the lower side of the vessel. The piece of 2x4 sticking out will be contoured. It is just screwed to another 2x4 that puts it the right distance from the turning centerline.

In this dangerous-looking picture, I'm using the hollowing jig to cut away the inside of the horribly unbalanced block.

The vibration actually wasn't too bad as I was able to adjust the rotation speed to avoid lathe resonances. Just the same I made sure to wear a full face shield and stand past the end of the spinning wood.

That resulted in this crudely shaped piece. Fortunately, the contoured part of the block didn't need to be particularly smooth.

And finally I managed to get things together by strapping the vessel to the block and then clamping the block to the carving table.

I started carving the outermost leaves first, then moved on to inner-layer leaves once I knew where the edges were.

I tried some detail carving of a few leaves as can be seen here but at this point I hadn't finalized how to do that.

This shows things a bit further along with lower-level leaves starting to be defined. I'm using a gouge from miniature carving set in this shot, needed for some of the finer details.

I started making holes through the wood for the between-leaves portions, mostly drilled using a Dremel tool with a tiny bit. Here I'm contouring the hole shape using a triangular needle file.

The top has also been contoured to follow the leaves at this point, again mostly with Dremel tool and files.

For finer work, I hand-held the piece for better control. Eventually I finished the outside and moved on to the inside, concentrating primarily near the top of the vessel.

When the carving was done to my satisfaction, I moved on to sanding. There are lots of edges and holes so I couldn't just grab a sheet of sandpaper and start going. Instead I used a number of jigs, mostly ones I had made for previous projects;

I had been wearing black gloves for most of the carving and it looked like the colour had rubbed off onto the wood and as a result the post-carving wood looked pretty grimy. That was fortunately removed in the sanding process.

This shot shows before and after photos of one section of the top to show the effect of the sanding.

Once the leaves were sanded they were ready for some more leaf-like detail. I tried a few options but decided as shown here to incise veins in a similar pattern to the actual leaves.

Unfortunately this was going to be problematic to do on the inside of the vessel. The gouge had to be at a very specific angle to cut the wood correctly and there was no way to get even a small gouge in there. After looking at some bad options (grinding? scratching?) I opted to make a tool that would let me adjust the angle of the cutting blade.

The specific gouge needed was called a parting tool or V-tool because it cuts a V-shaped trough in the wood. Fortunately I had a spare one from a low-end carving set I had inherited some time back. I decided to use the blade from this one for the new tool and simply chopped off the blade with a cutting wheel.

The idea was to have a beefy shaft that held the V-blade in a slot using a set screw. I grabbed a piece of 3/8" square steel bar to use for the shaft.

The slot needed to be just over 0.1" wide and I was able to form it using the cutting wheel shown here. I had first drilled the pilot hole for the set screw in the bar to locate things properly.

Then the bar was rounded a bit and the hole in the end tapped for a #8-32 thread.

I would need a handle, so I cut the bar to an appropriate length and grabbed a scrap of cherry to cut up for handle pieces. These were epoxied together to form the handle.

When the epoxy had hardened, I mounted the tool to the lathe to round off the handle. To spin it, I modified the wooden jam chuck to accept the tool end and used a live center at the other end.

And a few minutes of turning resulted in a rounded profile which was modelled on another carving tool I had. It also got a reduced-diameter section next to the shaft to hold a metal ferrule which would help prevent the wood from splitting.

The ferrule was just a 1/2" copper pipe joint cut to length and tapped into place. And with the blade clamped in place with the set screw, that completed the tool.

The blade can be positioned at almost any angle to the shaft and then held in place by tightening the set screw.

This wierdly blue-y photo (due to a bright LED lamp) shows how the tool could cut a vein at odd angles.

I needed to place the blade in only three or four different positions to get to all the angles required for the leaf veins. Some could still be cut from the top of the vessel and I used a conventional straight gouge for those since it was a bit easier to manipulate.

I did the interior first just in case I ran into problems with this technique, but in the end it worked out fine.

So with the inside done, it was on to the outside;

As I had done on the inside, I marked the veins in pencil to make sure the vein pattern would be centered and nicely spaced before starting to carve them.

For the outside carving I used a V-gouge from a miniature carving set since it gave the sharpest cut.

This photo shows the top of the vessel with the vein carving complete. I did a tiny bit more sanding and then declared the vessel done.

The vessel was finished with my favorite wipe-on polyurethane varnish. That give the vessel a bit more colour.

This somewhat irregular composite shot "unrolls" the vessel to show the leaves all around the circumference of the top.