Finish on my bowls

One of the harder things I encountered while learning bowl turning was not the turning at all. It was the finish my work had when I was done. I have always liked wood work with a high gloss shine that looked like it was made from glass instead of wood.

Experimenting with my pieces, I tried several kinds of finishes. I used waxes, oils, and polymers. I have some that I was happy with the finish from all these types, but the work required to reach my satisfaction varied with each.

Waxes do a good job of high gloss, but this look never lasts long. Oils just don’t seem to impart a high enough shine for me.

After trying shellac, sanding sealer, and polyurethane I settled upon poly as my favorite. It takes far less work and done right, gives the look of glass with no surface imperfections, just a solid smooth surface on the entire piece.

I do all the sealer on the lathe, but still had a problem of applying the poly evenly on the bowl. It is extremely hard to coat it with poly and not get too much in spots causing it to run.

I needed a way to revolve my bowl at very low rpms, and spray the poly on.

I narrowed the finish process down, once all sanding is done graduating from as low as 120 grit and advancing up to as high as 400 grit, to 3 coats of sanding sealer (deft spray sanding sealer) and 3 coats of gloss polyurethane (minwax spray gloss polyurethane).

The good part is that I do all the sanding on the lathe from my original mounting of the bowl. I also do all 3 coats of sealer on the same mounting, preserving my centered rotation and spin.

After the sanding, I let the bowl spin on the lathe and spray a light coat of sealer on the entire surface. Letting it continue to spin, it dries in no more than five minutes. At that point, I take a white felt strip about an inch wide and lightly burnish this coat while it spins.

You have to be careful not to let it get hot doing this or it will melt the sealer right off of the bowl. I do this two more times.

Now is when I take the bowl off the mount.

I got the inspiration of old LP record players that spin at 16 and 33 rpms, and thus went and found an old portable record player at a flea market. It cost $5.

Once I had it home, I had to modify it to hold my bowls. Since I usually bore a counterbored hole in the bottom of my bowls so that my four jaw chuck jaws fit inside this and I retract the jaws outward to grip my work, I needed a hub adapted to the record player that fit the spindle of the record player, and had a top on the hub that fit the recess of my bowls.

All I had to do was make it from wood.

The following pictures below depict the process of what I did, and turned the record player into the perfect turntable to spin my work at slow speed allowing me to spray polyurethane on them evenly every time.

I use this now on every bowl I make that I want a high gloss finish.

I hope the pictures below are clear enough to show you how easy it is to do this.

The portable record player

The lid open, showing the platter and spindle.

This is the bottom spindle adapter. There’s a hole bored in the bottom of it that fits over the player’s spindle. The top fits a hole in the hub.

This shows the adapter mounted onto the spindle and sticking out of the hole I bored in the players cover. This allows me to put the hub onto the adapter.

This is the hub, it has a hole bored in the bottom of it that fits over the top of the adapter.

Here is all of it mounted on the player, ready to accept a bowl.

Finally, the player with a bowl on it ready to be sprayed.