Project 1: The bowl

Project 1: The bowl

Introduction

This is the first project I have worked for BEIL0014 for making a bowl with the targeted radius of 155mm, the following shows the tools and procedures involved. 

Wooden tools

There are two types of wooden tools produced to help us to produce a uniform and round shape bowl. 1. The small wood board with three different types of radius, r125, r155, r275. In this project, I aim to create a bowl with r155. 

2. Circle wood strips with different radius. (d230, 180, 130, 80) These are used to draw perfect circles on the sheet aluminium to help hammering into a uniform bowl. 

Procedure

We start with a sheet of aluminium, crafting tools with the wooden circles are used to mark the sheet with permanent circles 

Next, metal is being cut in circle with the sharp edges caused by cutter to be grind away 

The metal is then ready to be hammered, I put the metal above the wooden panel which has a curved down shape to provide a gap for the metal to stretch and follow the profile of the wooden curve. I prefer to work from outer circle of the metal because it will be easier to start from edge and I expect two other side of the metal will shrink together causing a bent when I work on new area of the metal.  The circled area is an example of bent caused by shrinking. 

Then hammering work is gradually worked from outer circle to the centre of circle. Several  adjustment on of the metal has been made with the help of the wood board indicating the true r155 curvature. The following picture shows the first comparison between the curve of metal and the board. 

After the metal has turned into something like a bowl shape it is then brought to the English wheel where it's purpose is to act as a hammering to the bowl a thousand times in the line where the wheel and bowl make contact. Here I have chosen number 3 wheel since it has the best fit to my r155 objective. Since the wheel only covers a line of flattening, orientation has to change regularly and uniformly to produce smooth result. 

The bowl is then brought to a small metal hammer with the round metal as base.To remove any small uneven dents, after that it is bought back to English wheel.

Final measurement has been made to confirm the r155 is constant throughout the bowl.

measurement has been made in various spots, if the curve doesn't fit well, hammer is then used to adjust the curvature then it is brought to the English wheel, the process is being repeated until every spot of measurement is satisfied. 

Next, I went to Bunnings and try to find Brasso to polish the bowl but ended up I bought this. Together with the microfiber cloth, I was able to polish the metal and get the bowl finish.